


Un Nombre Desconocido

by Embleer_Frith0323



Series: Nightshade [2]
Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics), Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Crimes & Criminals, Family Bonding, Family Drama, Family Secrets, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Language, Police
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:41:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 54,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22521934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Embleer_Frith0323/pseuds/Embleer_Frith0323
Summary: Roughly sixteen-ish years post-Atropa Belladonna.An unexpected visitor brings a new element into Officer!Grayson's life.
Relationships: Artemis Crock & Dick Grayson & Wally West, Barbara Gordon & Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Barbara Gordon/Dick Grayson, Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Gannon Malloy, Dick Grayson & Jason Todd
Series: Nightshade [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1620514
Comments: 113
Kudos: 83





	1. It's a Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Hullo!
> 
> Bit of a cop-out re: the end of Bella, yes, I know. And yes, I'm aware I write lots of Nightwing!Dad fics. XD I CANNOT HELP IT I AM WEAK FOR THEM, OKAY??? :D
> 
> Spanish to English in end note. :D
> 
> Enjoy!
> 
> Much love,  
> EF <3 ^_^

CHAPTER 1 — “It’s a Girl”

  
  


_Lourdes_

  
  


Freezing in the lobby of a claustrophobic police department (more like the North Pole or freaking Hoth — where are all the Ton-Tons and elves?) wasn’t really how I envisioned spending my _quinceañera_ , but hey, I guess that’s what complimentary cups of coffee are for. I’m jittering right out of my goosebumped skin, having had two Ventis packed to the gills with sugar already from varying Starbucks on the last leg of the Greyhound journey to Blüdhaven — home of Nightwing, the First Hero to the Blüd! This cup is a burnt-tasting hazelnut, nasty as an old dude’s balls, but at least it’s warm. I grip the Styrofoam in my shaking hands. It _never_ gets this cold where I’m from, even in February.

I wonder if it’s obvious I haven’t showered in two days and have been on the road for four. I sip at my coffee, my nerves causing me to slurp with an unseemly noise that disturbs my companions in the waiting area. I look around apologetically, and then I snort and giggle into my cup, not really caring if I look like a freak — it doesn’t matter a lick if I’m rude or greasy. I mean, I’m a teen on the lam from a perfectly nice Catholic group home, dressed in an ancient, tattered BB-8 hoody. It’s stained all over with Diet Coke, coffee, mustard — pretty much remnants of _all_ the meals I tried eating neatly in the bumpy-ass bus seats. The hand-knitted arm warmers are punched with holes and there’s no hiding the industrial and septum piercings (courtesy of my ages-old trainer, Soos-Not-His-Real-Name, back home in Cali.) 

_Vaya,_ my stomach’s growling so loudly it’s like it’s talking to every person in this room. It’s been almost forty-eight hours since I ate, and my last meal was a vending machine cheeseburger at the Greyhound station during a layover. I’m down to my last scraps of pocket change, and if this doesn’t go well, I’ll barely be able to go limping back to California and St. Margaret’s Home for Girls. I overdid the coffee and underdid the food. Whoops.

I gnaw my lip, already chewed to bits, bleeding and clotted in some places. There isn’t enough chapstick in the universe to help me. Before Tía Constanza died a few months ago, she’d clap me upside the head any time she’d catch me picking or chewing my lips, a nervous habit I just can’t seem to shake. Then she’d spit and cross herself, praying for the demons to leave me.

“Tía Constanza,” my mother scoffed when she and I discussed our relative, my guardian, while in the visiting room some years back. She tugged at the sleeve of her orange jumpsuit, her thinning, oily hair falling over the bald spot left by the puckered scar on her scalp as she tilted her head to give our aunt a dazzling, yellowed smile. “Tía Loca, Tía Puta, Tía Puta Loca… your uncles and I always called Cunt-stanza.”

I covered my mouth and giggled, not wanting Constanza — Cunt-stanza! — to catch me having too much fun with _mi mamá._ She never approved of these visits to my mother in jail, claiming that they put the devil in me. But, she also said, she supposed a little girl needs her mother — and so, a visit from the parish priest (Father Stretch, we called him, a man so tall he had his own climate up atop his bald head) to pray over me following these trips to the San Diego Women’s Correctional Institute became the trade. Small price to pay to see Mamá. 

Look, I’m not dogging on my great-aunt or anything. She was just a bit of an _asca,_ a complete and total weirdo — comically neurotic and firmly established on her own planet, cemented in her fanatical religious beliefs and never open for business if someone wanted to poke holes in her ideologies. To her, I was just a kid born out of wedlock — something of a cursed child or abomination, fatherless and a permanent burden on her when my “good-for-nothing, _fracasada_ mother” was finally sentenced to life without parole. But I think Tía Loca loved me in her way, even if she never said it — I definitely loved her, and I miss her even now.

I snicker when I wonder what the dear old hag would have to say about _this_ visit — this little spontaneous romp across the country at the age of newly-minted fifteen to meet my “godless _fracasado cabrón”_ of a father.

 _If_ the sperm donor my mom pointed the finger at in her letter is, in fact, the guilty party — if this “Dick Grayson” is the godless _fracasado cabrón_ I actually share DNA with. I remember first reading his name and laughing wildly until I was almost sick. What mook goes by _Dick_ in this day and age? Unless Dick is as Dick does, anyway. Looking him up, his being a beneficiary of the famous, fabulously wealthy Bruce Wayne would definitely support that theory — trust me, I never met an overly monied white dude that wasn’t a condescending douche. My best friend, Alma, the only human being I shared the contents of Mamá’s letter with, giggled equally wildly when I told her my accused father’s name.

“Pffft,” she snorted as we wrapped our hands for class, “how much do you wanna bet that _tipo_ earned his name, knockin’ up _tu mamá_ and disappearing for your whole, entire life like he did? _Es un cabrón sin lugar a duda.”_

I snickered, but tapered off quickly, launching into shadowboxing in silence. It was hard _not_ to immediately chuck my as-yet faceless dad under the bus and write him off as an actual, literal dick, given that he was AWOL from the time of my birth. However, my mom strenuously assured me in her penned, final words that this “Dick” Grayson was _not_ a good-for-nothing bastard, as my aunt hollered at length and the situation at hand would suggest — merely that an extensive series of (apparently extremely?) complicated circumstances caused my existence to be kept from him, and his from me. 

_Cariño, you mustn’t be angry with your father. He never even knew you were born. He was never told of you, never informed — and he doesn’t have the slightest clue that you exist even now. I was held under lock and key in more than just the sense that I’ve been in prison, mija. For reasons I will not share but I’m sure you’ll learn someday, I’ve been forced not to have even the slightest contact with your father, and your aunt has made it clear she will not speak to him or pass messages for fear of backlash._

_But I can’t allow you to go on believing that you don’t have a father out there any longer, mi tesoro. You have the right to know that you DO have un papá that will love and protect you always. When I am gone and no one can stop me from telling you this, you must know he is there, that he’s alive, that he exists. And I promise you. He is not what Tía Puta Loca has led you to believe. You will love him instantly, and he will love you just as instantly. Lo prometo, preciosa._

Hmm. Happy Birthday and Valentine’s? Well, hopefully. I’ve spent my entire life imagining my father, flying every elaborate fantasy my already imaginative mind could conjure about him, drawing up all manner of scenarios so wholesome and perfect they were the stuff of the fictional families on PBS Kids _._ And I wondered without cease on a more basic level about my father — who he might have been, where he was, what he was like, did he know about me, how did he feel about my being here on earth. Would he love me and be proud of me if he knew me? Or was he just some loser who knocked up my mom and moved on uncaring like my aunt said? Was there more to the story? Mamá’s letter provided some insight already — and I’m _finally_ poised to get some real, lasting answers to my endless reel of burning questions.

I peel my grip from the cup to pull my mom’s letter out of my bulging messenger bag. This same bag I’ve nicknamed my Mary Poppins bag, since I’ve managed by some feat of magic to stuff all my crap in it — every last item I have to my name, all the bits and bobs that are _mine_ and not borrowed. My favorite item of all time is in there — a handmade stuffed elephant, with button eyes and bedecked in sewn circus regalia. Mamá crafted him for me in prison. I still remember her slipping it to me on my seventh birthday while visiting her, her hand sliding it into the confines of my hoody with a whisper and a wink as she hugged me goodbye.

I named him Oliphaunt, since I was into _Lord of the Rings_ at the time, calling him Ollie for short. He goes with me everywhere — school, work, training, spur-of-the-moment and ill-advised cross country trips. If I didn’t care about potentials for looking tragically uncool in front of my maybe-dad, I’d pull him out and clutch him now in an effort to quell my buzzing nerves.

“272?”

Ugh, _finally._ I stand, and make my hindered way to the vestibule. 

“How can I help you?” the older, myopic woman asks from her perch behind the window.

“Uh…” I shuffle the cup and letter to one hand, and give the secretary my call slip. “I’m here to see Detective Grayson?”

“What’s your name?”

“Lourdes Ayala,” I say, opting to give her the severely abridged version of my name. My full name is a mouthful. 

I can tell the secretary is forcing politeness as she takes in my unkempt appearance, although her efforts don’t hide the doubt that plainly crosses her aging features. “What are you wanting to see Lieutenant Grayson for?”

Her frown deepens as I scramble a moment, trying unsuccessfully to come up with something. I didn’t even get the guy’s title right.

“I’m just, uh… I mean, I just have a question about a case he’s working on,” I say with a shrug. My palms sweat and my shirt tacks itself to my back, making me shiver harder. This place is some _serious_ Mr. Popper’s Penguins crap.

“Hey, Anne —” an interrupting male’s voice filters into my hearing as its owner enters the vestibule through the door in the back, “can you hold onto these reports for the DA for me? I’m swamped this afternoon, so she said she’d come by and pick them up around three.”

“Sure,” says the secretary, Anne. “Say, Lieutenant — this girl is here to see you. Wants to ask you some questions about a case, apparently? You said you’re swamped, but do you have a second?”

My heart stops and my face goes blazing hot. Too many thoughts fly into my head for me to figure out even one of them. My jaw starts working and my heart kicks back into motion, thumping double-time as I — for the first time ever — lay my eyes on the man who might be my father.

I try not to be too obvious as I stare like a complete idiot, taking in the sight of him. He isn’t at all what I expected, even if I hadn’t known what to expect to begin with. Hearing that he was a cop in Blüdhaven, I guess I expected some humanoid, mustachioed copy of Jabba the Hutt, packed into a straining, sweaty, butterscotch uniform, hair balded into a crescent moon under his poorly fitting hat. The majority of my friends’ fathers look about that way, older and wrinkling like folded paper and sporting spare tires over their belted slacks.

Dick Grayson, my accused dad, looks more like a Guess ad than Jabba the Hutt in a police costume. He’s all easy smiles and black hair and sparkly blue eyes (that are _so_ much like my own.) No crooked cop stache to be found, nor evidence of a donut-induced paunch. Even his demeanor is surprising — cheerful and lively, hardly the sour, grouchy mood that infects this entire place like a rapidly mutating deadly virus.

Someone so sunny, and who even on a mere first glance appears so bubbly and pleasant? Yeah. I could handle a dad like that. Hope steals over me — real hope, hope that I fight to crush before it can catch hold. Hope is a forerunner to disappointment, and disappointment here would be the one to end all.

“In fact, I do,” says Lieutenant Grayson. He turns his smile on me, and I go all fuzzy and hopeful in an instant in spite of myself. “What can I do for you on this fine, frigid morning, Miss…”

“Uh, Ayala,” I reply, growing increasingly jittery as I fiddle with my coffee cup and Mamá’s note. “Lourdes Ayala. I just have some, umm, questions to ask you. About a case. Uh — that’s all.” I smile stupidly, realizing how humiliatingly awkward I sound.

“All right, then,” he says, his tone remaining warm and friendly. “Come on back and we’ll see if I have some answers.”

Anne frowns, obviously annoyed, and I give her a bit of a smug look (I can’t resist) as I pass her to meet Grayson in the hall by the vestibule. I follow him into a little windowed office in the back corner of the building. He shuts the door after I’ve entered, although he leaves the blinds on the windows up. He rounds his desk, shuffling a pile of papers to the side, while I study his office.

It’s simple, mostly showcasing his degrees and certifications on the wall (Blüdhaven U in network security and criminal justice, a certificate indicating a pass of the detective’s exam, a framed CEH document, tons of other indicators of nerd certifications.) There’s a Haly’s Circus poster on the wall, a photo of Grayson standing with an elephant on his bookshelf. _Vaya,_ that’s cool. Ollie’s circus get-up makes even more sense beyond Maybe-Dad’s carney kid upbringing.

There are more photos, namely one of him with a red-haired woman on a beach. He’s in a tux, she in a white dress, his arms clutching her in the cradle hold while she grasps a bouquet. My heart only gets faster when I see the wedding ring on Grayson’s left hand. Nothing that came up when I Googled him indicated a wife. I might have a stepmother, siblings, too. 

“Why don’t you have a seat?” he asks, gesturing to one of the chairs across from his desk as he sits down. “Do you want some water or anything? I think I have hot chocolate in here somewhere.” He pops open a drawer to sift through it.

I shake my head, and indicate my coffee. “No, thanks. Still working on this monstrosity.”

He grins, an expression that clearly comes naturally to him, and puts me at ease on the spot. I sit down, and let my bag rest on the floor.

“Is that one of those cheapo not-hazelnut things from the waiting room?” he asks. 

I nod. “Yeah. Hazelnut — liquid turd, more like.”

I immediately regret saying that — what the heck kind of cop wants to learn his daughter is some trash-mouthed punk from the streets of LA? — until he laughs a genuine belly laugh that gets me chuckling, too.

“Liquid turd — pretty accurate,” he says, still chuckling. 

I grin, feeling now marginally better. I deposit the cup of liquid turd on the floor by my chair.

“So, Lourdes,” Grayson says, straightening a bit. “Lourdes — that’s a pretty name.”

“Thanks,” I say happily, feeling my cheeks flush.

“One you don’t hear every day, either. Anyway — what brings you in this morning?”

I take a breath, the shakes starting back up as I fidget and roll the note in my hand.

“It’s, umm… it’s kind of a long story,” I begin. “I don’t actually have any questions about a specific case. Mostly, it’s questions about my mom. Umm, I lost her, and my aunt, recently —”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” he interjects, his voice gentle, all levity gone just like that. 

I pause. Cops are usually so disingenuous and to-the-point. This expression of sympathy alone is new.

“Thanks,” I say, unsure of what else to reply with. “My aunt was old and had a lot of heart problems before it happened, and umm… my mom’s just… well, she’s kind of her own story, we’ll just put it that way.” He nods. “Anyway. I’ve been in a Catholic group home the last few months.”

“Are they treating you okay there?”

I nod. “Oh, yeah, I mean — okay enough. They’re definitely not _bad_ people or anything.” I squirm a little. Sister Nancy, my one sorta friend there, has got to be freaking out by now, doubtless calling the police and sending out search parties and putting up fliers. I fiddle with a loose lock of my unwashed hair, assaulted with guilt. Grayson, again, nods, and sits back in his chair a little, waiting for me to go on.

“Anyway, my mom wrote me a letter before she died, and…” I bite at what’s left of my lower lip, then start picking at it. “I think you might have known my mother.”

“What was her name?”

Getting close to the grand finale. My heart hammers as I take another breath. Here goes… 

“Catalina Flores.”

A look comes over his face, a shadowy expression that darkens his features for a breath, one that gives him away as definitely having known Mamá — but not in a happy or good capacity. His jaw sets into a hard slab, his brows knit over the bridge of his nose. I press my upper teeth hard into my ragged lower lip, wondering now why I’ve come, why I’ve done this.

My mom hanged herself in her jail cell two months ago. She had been sentenced to life without parole for things that no one has ever seemed keen on sharing in any specifics with me. Light research caused me to close the window on the group home’s community computer — _mass murder, domestic terrorism, felony stalking._ I left off there. Her crimes, previously something of a dark mystery, I decided were ones I didn’t _want_ to get to the bottom of. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that Grayson doesn’t leap for joy at this connection to my mother, even if it hurts me in a weird way. No one has ever expressed any sort of positive response to my mother’s name.

“Catalina Flores?” Grayson asks, still frowning in that dark way.

I nod. “Yeah.”

“As in… Catalina Maria Flores-Rodriguez? The former FBI agent?” he asks.

Again, I nod. That I _did_ know about my mother — that she had briefly been in the FBI until her partner died. 

Grayson’s frown deepens, and he inclines his head. “Lourdes, how old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I’m uh, I’m fifteen today, actually,” I reply, my foot turning in reflexive, strengthening circles. I rolled it last week working on my jiu-jitsu and the thing still hurts like a son of a bitch.

“Oh.” He softens momentarily. “Well, happy birthday — Valentine’s Day baby.”

I half-smile and say thanks, although the well wish fails to quell my rekindled nerves.

Grayson’s frown returns, and he passes a hand over his hair. “Lourdes… I don’t know how to tell you this, but the Catalina Flores _I_ knew died almost sixteen years ago.”

My turn to frown and look confused. I shake my head. “Uh… no? She died two months ago. In jail.”

Grayson just gazes at me a moment, a million emotions flitting across the blue pools of his eyes like little, darting fish, and then he sucks his teeth.

“Look. It’s not that I don’t believe you.” He lifts a conciliatory hand. “But the timing and stories just aren’t adding up, here — I was told that Catalina died of a gunshot wound to the head on Byke Beach in May of 2022.”

I shift, and turn my gaze to the floor, my hammering heart only going faster now. 

“Well, my mom _did_ get shot in the head at about that time,” I tell him, pulling at my battered lip. “But — it didn’t _kill_ her. It just, umm… put her in a coma for a few weeks and gave her a bad scar at her hairline. And she’d have like… brain fatigue and seizures now and then.”

Grayson’s frown grows even darker, his face like a thunderhead, fixing to storm at any moment. 

“You said she died in jail?” he asks.

I nod. “It was a… do-it-yourself kind of thing.”

His expression, again, goes softer. “What facility?”

“San Diego Women’s Correctional.”

“Okay. Can you hold on for one second?” 

I watch him as he boots up his computer, clicking the mouse and typing on the keyboard at a rate of speed so fast it would be better bestowed on that speedster in Missouri. 

After some moments of this, his shoulders stoop a bit in his chair, and he exhales. He passes a hand over his face, and turns his expression to me. 

“I’m sorry, Lourdes,” he says. “Really, I am. I was under the impression for all these years that your mother died back in ’22. I had _no_ idea she was still alive.”

I shake my head, a little heartened now. “It’s okay.”

He gives me an expression that’s equal parts concerned and legitimately sympathetic, veiling the undercurrent of informational overload that can’t fully be hidden. “So… how are you holding up?”

I pause, considering. “Oh. I’m… holding up, I guess? I only saw her a few times a year, and… it’s not like I was very shocked when I heard she killed herself.” I’m quiet for a second, then sigh. “I guess I kind of saw it coming. She was always really sad, you know?”

He nods. “I do. And she was.” He focuses on the surface of his desk for a moment. “God — to think she was alive for all this time… then…” He returns his gaze to me, his lips thinning, his face somber. “It not being shocking, necessarily, doesn’t mean it’s not going to come with its own sense of shock, though, huh.”

“...Yeah.” 

For some reason, I feel like crying, thinking about my mother, her dark, sad eyes, the shadowed, aging face, the lank, oily hair, the stoop to her shoulders and the stress pouch in her belly. She would light up every time she saw me, whispers of her former self coming to the fore each time she hurried across the scuffed jungle green of the visiting room floor to hug me for so long the breath would pop right out of me and my body would get tired under the strained posture. She was always cheerful during our talks, asking me about my grades and MMA, what my favorite subjects in school were. She’d query about my friends, about whether or not I had crushes or boyfriends. She’d ask how Constanza was treating me.

When the time came to leave, the life would go out of her in a visible _whoosh._ Her shoulders would slump, her eyes go dull and glassy, her face become slack and dark. She would hug me, only letting go when Tía Loca or a guard forced her to.

I haven’t been able to truly _feel_ her death since the news came, a cold, creeping numbness twisting like unfeeling vines around my heart, closing it away from the pain and stab of grief. Any time I dare dwell on it, I start to think about what might have been different if I had been able to see her more, if I had been available to take her calls more frequently instead of always being out of the house at training or with friends or running errands for Soos, if I wrote her more letters, sent her more care packages — and then the anger with my aunt begins, anger I don’t want to feel for the person who cared for me from the time I was born. I don’t want to assign blame to myself, to Constanza. It’s easier to shut it out altogether, huddle against it, distract myself.

But now, forced to talk about my mom, those feelings are seeping out through the vines that squeeze my heart into a numb ball. I hold my breath, and keep my gaze trained on the floor.

Now isn’t the time for this. Here isn’t the place for it. Tears get you railed on the streets. It’s no different off them.

There’s an extensive, loaded silence as Grayson gazes at me, his expression inscrutable, but probing at the same time. I jiggle one leg, keep rotating the opposite ankle. My eyes are misting and sight blurring. I blink, and keep my eyes shut a moment, only opening them when I’m confident there won’t be any tears.

“Can I ask you something?” Grayson says after a time, his voice quiet, gentle — but knowing. 

I nod.

“Why are you here, Lourdes?” he asks. “What do you want to ask me?”

I’m quiet a moment under his blue stare — the stare that is so like mine. As I study him, I pick out even more similarities between us. I don’t favor my mother all that much — but Grayson, I can see _such_ a startling amount of myself in.

I sit on the hope that this man — this man my mother promised I would love instantly, and I find that is happening already — is my father, and prepare instead for crushing disappointment. Thank you, come again, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

Set the bar so low you don’t trip on it, right?

Oh, boy. Here we go… 

I take a breath.

“I’m here because I think you might be my father,” I say. I take my mom’s letter, still in my hand, and extend it to him. “This is the letter my mom wrote me before she died. She told me who you were, where I’d find you… all that.” I sit back in my chair. “So… here I am.”

He’s pin-drop silent, although he opens the sheet of paper, and reads unspeaking. Although his facial expression doesn’t change, I see the blood draining visibly from his face. By the time he lowers the letter, his skin is as white as the paper it was written on. 

“You said you’re fifteen today?” he asks.

I nod.

He’s quiet for a long, long moment, his eyes not leaving me, then reaches for the phone on his desk.

“Anne,” he says after a moment, “can you do me a favor and cancel my day?” A beat. “I’m aware — I’ll get with Amy on that. I’ll see if Malloy can handle the rest.” Another beat. “Just trust me when I tell you this is more important. Okay?” Another spell of quiet. “I appreciate it, Annie-bear. Thank you.” He half-smiles. “You know you love me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He shifts the receiver between his ear and shoulder, and holds up a finger to me with an apologetic look, mouthing _Just a second_ while he dials another number. 

“Dr. Thompkins?” he says. “It’s Dick Grayson.” I shift, feeling weird about eavesdropping, but also dying with curiosity. “I’m all right. Are you… I mean, would you happen to be available here in a few?” A pause. “Okay. Well, how quick do you think you can have the results of a paternity test back if we get it done today?” 

Those words are a bit of a smack in the head — it’s not that it’s unfair to request one, and honestly, I kind of expected it, but to have to wait even longer for confirmation that I’m not some woebegone bastard kid sucks pretty hard, not going to lie. 

“Long story, Leigh,” Grayson continues. “But you said you can have them to me just after?” He glances at me. “Awesome, that’s perfect. We’ll be there in a few.”

He places the phone in its cradle, and lets go of a breath.

“Okay,” he says. “Listen. There’s a couple of things that need to happen, here. You said you’ve been staying in a group home?”

I nod. “The St. Margaret’s School for Girls, yes.”

“And going by the information at hand, I’m assuming they’re out in California?”

Again, I nod.

“Do they know you’re here?”

I chew my lip, worming it to the side under my teeth. I shake my head.

Again, he blows out a sigh. “All right. First things first. We’re going to call the group home, and we’re going to let them know you’re here and that you’re okay.” I consider protesting, but nod, instead. “After that, we’re going to have a paternity test done — not because I don’t believe you, but because it’s going to need to be done for legal purposes if you came here intending to stay.” His eyes shift to the over-packed bag on the floor. “Which… going by the fact that it looks like you packed your whole life into that bag a la Mary Poppins, I’m guessing you did.”

I stare, taken aback.

“I… actually call that my Mary Poppins bag,” I say with a light huff.

He smiles. “Great minds, right?”

_Or… like father like daughter._

I sit on that thought.

“Anyway. I was… well, I’m not really sure what I was intending, to be honest,” I say lamely. “I guess I thought I’d just kind of get here and figure out if you were my dad or not and go from there?”

His smile broadens, disarming me at once. “Fair enough. What’s St. Margaret’s’ number, do you know offhand?”

I shake my head. The honest truth is that I don’t. My aunt never let me have a smartphone, and it’s not as though Sister Nancy was about to cough up to buy me one. The only people who know I rabbited to Blüdhaven are my best friend Alma (sworn to secrecy) and Soos-Not-His-Real-Name, who filled out my bogus unaccompanied child travel forms for Greyhound (equally sworn to secrecy.) At least the regulations changed and I could shift from coach to coach, a legal luxury I wouldn’t have been afforded a mere few years ago. 

“All right,” says… Dad? “What’s the address?”

That much I know, and I respond in turn. 

“Good. Let me work my magic real quick…”

Some typing and clicking later, and Hopefully-Dad lifts the phone to dial the number into it. 

“Hi, may I speak with Sister Mary Dornsyfe?” he says, and I squirm. Sister Mary is the penultimate Gestapo variety hausfrau. “...This is Dick Grayson with the Blüdhaven Police Department — I’m calling because I’ve got Lourdes Ayala here in my office.” He gives me a look as he continues, “Yeah, she’s okay. All in one piece and seems none the worse for wear.” He chuckles. “I have no idea how on earth she got all the way out here, but trust me, I intend to find out for you.” A beat. “The why she’s out here is that she’s looking for her biological father.” Another beat. “Well, you’re actually speaking with the accused right now. We’re going to clinch whether I’m guilty here in a few.” He laughs. “Sure. Can I call you on this number?” He shifts in his chair. “Awesome. Talk to you soon, Sister Mary.”

He hangs up, and rises. Resting his hands on the surface of the desk a moment, he takes a breath. 

“Okay, Lourdes,” he murmurs. “You ready to go get this question definitively answered?”

I nod. “Dude, I’ve been ready to have this question answered since I first expressed cognition. I was probably ready in the womb. Drove my aunt nuts.”

He rounds the desk and holds the door for me. “I bet.”

I follow him out, keeping my head down as he takes his uniform coat from a hook in the wall and we exit the building into the cold of the Blüdhaven afternoon. He glances at me, and frowns.

“Do you have a coat?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Just this hoody. It hardly ever got cold enough for a legit coat in Cali. I’m _really_ not used to this North Pole type weather.”

He chuckles, and extends his coat. “Here, take mine. Winters in the Blüd are no joke.” 

I hesitate a little, but he gestures. 

“It’s okay — go ahead and take it,” he insists gently.

At his kind tone, I do, and put it on while he takes my bag. He shoulders it, and leads me to the parking lot from the doors. 

“Now, before we leave — are you okay with riding up to Gotham with me to have this test done?” he asks. 

I nod. “Sure. I mean… you seem harmless.”

He chuckles. “That’s up for debate, I’m afraid, considering I’m a cop in the Blüd.” 

“Yeah, you just reek of corruption,” I say, and follow him to a non-descript sedan. Again, he opens the door for me. Quizzically, I thank him. No one _ever_ holds the door for me. 

“All right, then,” he says as I climb into the seat, “saddle up, partner.”

I laugh a bit as he shuts the door, and then entertain a whole new rush of nervous excitement as he hops into the driver’s seat and starts up the car. Here goes nothing.

“So,” he says as he pulls out into traffic, “how’d you get all the way out here from California? And _please_ tell me you didn’t hitchhike.”

I snort. “You can relax on that one, Maybe-Dad. I came in style — I took the bus.” I resist the urge to put my feet up on the dash. “Anyway. I kinda pity the fool that’d mess with me if I _did_ hitch.”

“Oh, yeah?” 

I smile at him, and lift an arm to humorously assume a flex pose. “5 in 0 amateur MMA record.”

He looks over at me with an expression like wonder. “No kidding — and you said you’re fifteen today?”

“Yep. Five fights over the past year. I won two by knock-out, one by decision, and two by submission.” I settle into a tolerably comfortable position with my knees bent and heels digging into the edge of the passenger seat. “I mean… I know I’ll lose someday. Maybe even my next one. That’s just the sport, you know? But… I wanna rest on my laurels for as long as I can and at least _try_ to fight for a good long time undefeated. Maybe even become a murker someday.”

He smiles. “5 in 0 at fifteen, I’d definitely say you’ve got a shot at becoming a murker and retiring undefeated. What’s your preferred art?”

This unexpected companionability and ease of conversation relaxes me, enabling me to forget the strangeness of this situation and the fear of dashed hopes and joys — at least for now. I lean against the door, facing Grayson, tucked into the warmth of his coat. 

“I’m mostly a striker, but I can hold my own on the ground,” I say proudly, happy when I see his eyes light up. 

We continue chatting, bizarrely comfortable with one another with an almost preternatural immediacy — although I can’t help detecting something of a dark undercurrent, some form of tense energy that Grayson keeps barely hidden. I gnaw and pick at my lip, trying to ignore those churning riptides that hide beneath the otherwise placid surface of the sea between us. Granted, I guess it’s not the most assuring thing in the world to have some girl you’ve never laid eyes on just show up in your office claiming to be your daughter — and that the baby mama was someone you apparently had a bit of a stormy history with.

It’s obvious that Maybe-Dad _really_ knows his martial arts, segueing into bringing up ones I’ve never even heard of before the talk shifts to the traffic and how it’s generally terrifying to out-of-towners (absolutely true — 90 mph bumper-to-bumper and lane changes so sudden my short, sad life passes before my eyes multiple times.) We also discuss the weather — generally understood to be the single most boring and impersonal topic in the history of human communication, but actually interesting in light of water-effect winter, wind patterns, and the annual precipitation rates, along with comparisons to California. I burn to ask about his wife, about Bruce Wayne, but decide I maybe should wait until after we get this little duo of finger pricks out of the way.

Rolling into Gotham, I peer with interest out the window — it’s a new sight, with tall, tall, _tall_ buildings rising together in clusters so tight that it all feels a little claustrophobic before long. These clusters go on seemingly forever, with no end in sight to them, just miles of skyscrapers and reaching older buildings of varying architectural styles. There’s a deeper fall of snow here than in Blüdhaven, the blankets of white covering every untouched surface. Lights blink all over, variations of neon and incandescent, softened by the snowfall. The snow in and of itself is novel — it only flurried once in LA that I can remember, when I was really little. It doesn’t seem to daunt the Gothamite pedestrians, all of them plugging the sidewalks and crosswalks, so many spots of color against the snow and so much motion against the stationary edifices. 

Grayson notices my interest, and smiles. “Have you been to Gotham before?”

I shake my head. “Nah, I’ve never even been out of LA other than to visit Mamá. I’ve only seen Gotham in movies. It’s pretty different in real life — like… bigger? Older?” I shrug. “It’s still pretty, though.”

He nods. “It is. Grows on you for sure.” He pulls into the lot of a brownstone building. “Well, we’ve arrived at our destination — please secure your tray table and remain seated until the unmarked paddywagon has come to a complete stop…” I smirk at him, and shake my head. He smiles in turn. “You ready?”

I nod, and once he’s parked the car, I fall into step with him as we enter through the sliding glass doors into the doctor’s office. I sit, exercising my aching ankle and studying the fascinating design on the carpeted floor while he fills out some paperwork. I can’t decide if I like the flooring or not, although the plants are nice to look at. Once Maybe-Dad has completed the paperwork, it’s onto more of the agonizing waiting game — although now, I at least have company. But this time, neither of us speaks. It seems like a life age of the universe goes by before we’re finally summoned into the back.

The nurse shuttles us into a little exam room decorated in teals and purples with Degas prints on the walls. Grayson sits in the chair opposite me, and just as he’s about to speak, the door opens.

“Hi, Dick,” the woman — _the_ Dr. Thompkins, as indicated by the tag on the lanyard around her neck — greets him. He raises a hand with that unending smile of his, and then the doctor, an older, handsome woman, turns to me. “And who’s this?”

“Lourdes,” I say, and shake her hand when she extends hers.

“Nice to meet you,” she tells me with a nod. “So… just to reaffirm, it’s a paternity test we’re doing today?”

Grayson nods. “That’s right.”

She lifts her brows. “Ah, Dickie. To think Brucie might be a grandpa…” She chortles a bit, and Grayson tightens his lips. “Well, let’s not keep the suspense going any longer in that case, huh?”

Maybe-Dad and I both laugh, and vociferously agree. The test is quick and fairly painless, just a wipe with an alcohol pad, a quick prick to the fingertip, a press of cotton, the end. Grayson smiles at me as we wait some more, although I notice he’s fidgeting as much as I am. The tension _rolls_ off of him in palpable waves. Like me, he advertises his emotions, whether he wants to or not. Something in common, regardless of whether we share blood. Again, neither of us speaks, although the silence somehow seems impossibly loud, and only grows louder by the moment.

The door _at last_ opens, and both of us jerk our heads to look up at Dr. Thompkins as she enters.

“Well,” she announces, and shuts the door with a deafening click and thunk. She looks away from the clipboard she has in her hand, and gazes at Dick a moment.

“Well?” Dick and I both say at the same time. I glance at him, wondering if we’re at a point I can say _jinx, haha!_ He’s spring-loaded, frowning, his face flushed and eyes bright with anticipation to match my own — but I relax and smile when he gives me a quick, mouthed “ _Jinx.”_

Dr. Thompkins purses her lips and gestures a bit. “It’s a girl.”

Grayson’s eyes go as big as two planets and he inclines his head. My face heats up and my heart leaps. 

“So she’s…” he begins, and Thompkins nods.

“Your daughter, yes,” she finishes. 

An even louder silence falls over the room, and as Grayson looks over at me and I return his gaze, I realize that finally, after a lifetime of questions and wondering and curiosity and pain and sorrow and yearning and angst, I am looking into the eyes of my father — the eyes that, again, are _so_ like my own.

  



	2. Round One: Meet and Greet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone! <3 
> 
> I'd like to thank our lovely betas/pre-readers aj_mcleod, my dear bestie, and chibi_nightowl for your help and input on this chapter! <3 Y'all are WONDERFUL!
> 
> Spanish to English at the end! Happy reading and enjoy! 
> 
> Xoxoxoxoxoxoxo,  
> EF

**CHAPTER 2 —** “Round One: Meet and Greet”

  
  


_Lourdes_

  
  


“So… what now?” I ask Dad — Dad! Ohmigod! Dad! _Mi papá! —_ as we step out onto the sidewalk outside.

He takes a deep breath and blinks against the snowfall. “Well, a couple of things. I have about ninety-nine phone calls to make at some point, to name one.” He rubs at the back of his neck. “I mean… I think an announcement of _some_ kind is in order here.”

I shrug. “Want to get a dumb photo taken and caption it with something really sappy and then we can send it out in the mail?”

I’m disarmed — again — when he smiles that infectious smile at me, the one that remains so sparkly in spite of the mantle of palpable shock that still cleaves to him.

“I like the way you think,” Dad chuckles. “Come to think of it, there’s actually a photobooth not too far from here we can use… what say we head over there?”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” I say, falling into step beside him as we make our way up the sidewalk. “Only one rule, though, no serious faces or you’re not my dad anymore.”

“Oh, them’s fightin’ words,” he says, grinning over at me. “Better show some respect for your old man.”

I grin back. “Or what, you gonna ground me?”

“Eh, maybe I’ll just take your phone and Internet privileges away,” he says. “Phoneless, dateless, TV-less, Amish existence.”

I laugh. “Well. I don’t have a phone, and I hardly ever watch TV, and I never go on dates, and I was at church three times a week, so…” I lift my hands, palms-up. “Sounds like I’m getting off Scot free.”

He stares at me, and shakes his head. “Girl, we’ve _gotta_ get you into some form of teenage normalcy.”

“Well, I snuck out a bit after curfew. Is that teenage normalcy?”

“Tsk, tsk…”

I nudge his arm, and he smiles down at me. I’ve never seen anyone _smile_ so much.

“Well, other than the occasional sneak-out after curfew, what else did you get up to?” he asks. 

“Like… What would I do when I snuck out?”

He chuckles. “Sure. But more… why don’t you tell me about yourself? Interests, preferences, favorites, likes, dislikes, friends, enemies, frenemies…”

“Oh,” I say. “Well, Detective Grayson, your cop self can chill, because I didn’t get up to anything nefarious when I went flying headfirst out my window at night. I mostly just met my friends Alma and Cerdo at the arcade and I’d go run a few errands for my trainer.”

He looks down at me. “You have a friend named… Pig?”

I laugh. “Well, Oscar, actually. It’s a nickname. He _never_ stops eating and he looks like a walking stick. I don’t know, it just fits the guy.” 

He chuckles. “I have a friend like that, actually. A couple, come to think of it.”

I chuckle, too. “So I take it you speak some Spanish?”

“ _Si,”_ he replies, “ _hablo español con fluidez.”_

“Dang,” I say, impressed. “Even your accent’s better than mine. Soon as I bust into Spanish it’s pretty obvious I’m a punk kid from LA.”

He gives me a dubious grin. “What…? You, a punk kid? I don’t believe you for a second.”

I laugh. “ _¿Por qué? Soy una gamberra total.”_ I pause. “Well. According to my aunt, anyway.”

“God rest your aunt, Lourdes, but I think she might have been a _little_ off when describing you as _una gamberra._ You yourself said you don’t go on dates, you don’t have a phone, you hardly ever watch TV, and the worst thing you did was sneak out to go to an arcade. Not to mention, you’re _very_ well-mannered — and I have some pretty high standards on that front,” he says. “So… describing yourself as a hoodlum doesn’t fit.”

I have no idea what to say. Everyone except for Alma and Cerdo regards me as some punk kid or aberration of God’s natural order. Even Soos, for all he’s been nothing but giving and available, looks at me as one busted shoelace away from a street rat.

Grayson breaks the awkward pause.

“So other than the fact that you’re a very polite and well-spoken young lady who apparently likes _Star Wars —_ I do, too, by the way…” Dad (ahhh!) says, “what else can you let me in on about yourself?”

I smile, thrilled beyond words to finally be sharing these things with mi papá — so many long and deep-seated wishes at last fulfilled. “Well. I like purple. I like mixed martial arts, not because I like the fight itself, but because I _love_ how every motion feels like a dance that you have to choreograph on the fly. I like math. I hate civics. I like to read fantasy novels and play D&D. I could spend all weekend playing video games at Cerdo’s house when my aunt would let me — the stupider and more pointless the game, the better. I like clothes because I’ve never been able to afford them and my aunt was kinda specific about what she’d let me wear — yes, I went to some very elaborate lengths to hide my piercings.” He laughs. “I like makeup because I was never allowed to wear it. I could eat Greek food every day of my life and never get tired of it. I like animals, but I really love rabbits and horses for some reason. I like punk music. I like horror movies, although my favorite movie of all time is probably _Predator._ As far as dislikes go…” I consider. “I’m not a fan of mean people or bullies. I would just as soon sign myself up for ritual sacrifice as eat a lima bean. I don’t like to not be busy or doing something or to like… not have a goal.” I pause. “I guess that’s about it.”

I notice he’s been smiling all throughout my disclosure. I tilt my head. “What?”

“Just… we actually have a bit in common,” he says. “You said you like horses?”

I nod. “I’ve… not actually seen one up close, though.”

“Well, you’re in luck — my foster father owns a few horses. He’s actually got a handful of champion race horses among them. I could take you up to see them, if you want. Not to mention, there are a lot of Percherons in Haly’s Circus we can hang out with anytime. When the weather’s warmer we can teach you to ride.”

It’s all I can do not to bounce up and down like a four-year-old at a birthday party — I have to restrain myself with all my might, and even then, I still go up on my toes. And not merely because _my father_ is going to teach me to ride a horse — but because he offered to _in the future._ “Oh, can we?”

He chuckles. “Of course. Plus, you can meet said foster dad and my acting grandfather while we’re there. I swear, Bruce is going to have a massive coronary over this one.” He pauses, and frowns. “Look — I know we’ve known each other for oh, about a whole hour and a half, but it’s your _quinceañera,_ so… how about we celebrate — like for _real_ celebrate — later after we’ve gotten some introductions crossed off the list?” He gives me a regretful look. “Might be a little short notice to organize a legit party befitting the occasion, but I’ll see what I can do.”

I shrug. “Oh, pffff, I don’t know if it’s _that_ big a deal — it’s not like I can drive or get my temps yet, so…”

“Lourdes, it’s still a birthday — of _course_ it’s a big deal. And let’s be real, doubly so to me, considering I’ve, um…” He pauses, and frowns darkly at the sidewalk. “Considering I’ve missed every single one of your birthdays before now.”

I shake my head. “Well, that’s okay. I mean — you didn’t know. _I_ didn’t know. You don’t need to look like you just shot my dog and ran over the carcass.”

He softens a bit. “It’s really not okay. You understand that, right?”

“If you say so. But… look, uh…” I push my ponytail over my shoulder when the wind behind us blows it in my face. Guess we’ll see if Gotham grows on me, let alone Blüdhaven. “Just knowing you exist and getting to actually… like… _see_ you is enough of a birthday present for me, anyway.” I pause, knowing I’m running the risk of running my mouth in a way that would have both Soos _and_ Constanza poised to holler at me in intermittent Spanish and English. But now, it’s as though the tap is turned on, and the only way to shut it off is to just let the tank pour itself out. Something about Grayson’s — Dad’s — presence inspires that in me, a weird and uncustomary desire to just tell him everything in the most minute detail. “I’ve never really wanted anything else for my birthday for as long as I can remember, to be honest. So… that you let me dump this on you in the middle of your workday and you _didn’t_ throw me out on my can like I’m a completely raving whacko is gift enough, deal?”

He gives me a look, although his eyes twinkle. “No deal. I need more convincing.”

“Okay, fine. Don’t you have a lady friend in your life? Sounds more like Valentine’s Day should be on your mind.”

“I _do_ have a lady friend in my life, and with regard to Valentine’s Day, I’m thinking our plans are going to have to shift a bit later — I’ve got a _lot_ of people to introduce you to, my wife chief among them.” He turns his gaze to me. “But in seriousness? Your birthday is _not_ just another day. Not with your old man on the job.” He pauses. “...That’s so crazy to say.” 

“You’re telling me,” I agree. “Up until two weeks ago, I didn’t even know I actually had a dad.” 

He slows to a stop, and I pause beside him. He studies me in quiet a moment, seeming to take in every inch of my appearance. Somehow, it’s not uncomfortable — rather, I find myself doing the same.

We favor each other beyond a doubt — the same eyes and jawline, identical eyebrows, similar hair and skin tone. Closer to him like this, I can pick out indications of his age — crow’s feet around his warm, twinkling eyes, a slight line across his forehead. His lip turns up in a half-smile as he gazes at me.

“You’re really here, aren’t you?” he asks, his voice quiet, and lays a hand on my face. His palm, callused and warm, forms to my cheek. 

Normally, I’d bristle to be touched like this by a man who as yet should be strange to me — I’m fussy about who touches me, given that creepers abound in the gym back in Cali. But I find that my father’s hand on my cheek — gentle, loving, paternal, anything but creepy — is _soothing_ in a way I never knew such a gesture could be. It’s scary — but it’s nice, too. 

“Yeah… I guess I am,” I say. “Corporeal and everything.”

“God, I can’t believe it,” he says, his eyes flicking over my face with an unhidden wonder. “I’ve had a daughter all this time…” He lowers his hand, and lifts his arms. A smile crosses his face. “Can I — can I hug you? Is that okay?”

Normally, I’d run screaming in the opposite direction. Since the dreaded monster _Pubertus_ fell upon me, the middle-aged dudes that frequented Drake’s Gym all but _congregated_ around me. They’d try to put their arms around me, poke at my biceps or abs, offer to work on grapples, and the whole while they’d talk all sweet like they just wanted to shepherd and mentor me — but I knew the truth. That lot of men in particular (five in total) was a particularly disagreeable one, so as such they couldn’t get one single, self-respecting, of-age woman to look in their direction. By default, they turned their attention to Alma and me, assuming we “young and impressionable _chicas”_ would be easier sells. Soos and Cerdo intervened when they got especially unruly, but some severely unwanted hugs were had on a few occasions. One word — ew.

But now, looking at my father, I want nothing more than to just go all in on a hug — and preferably one that will still be going on when trumpets sound and all the believers are raptured to Heaven. 

I answer him by gleefully flinging my arms around him, mushing my face to his chest. I nod against his uniform shirt, entertaining a moment of guilt when I notice he’s a little shivery in the cold. But there’s gratitude, too, with the knowledge that he gave me his coat so I wouldn’t freeze in the sub-Arctic chill. He laughs, and his arms go around me — warm in spite of the cold, strong, and astonishingly _safe._

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he says, and gives me a squeeze. 

Something strange comes over me in this moment. It’s an unfamiliar feeling — an odd and sudden sense of completion, security, _home._ All my life I felt as though there were wheels under me, like my life was a cart at the top of a hill, bound to roll away at any moment and carry me to God knows where. The closest I ever came to feeling at home was at Drake’s, and even there I had to watch my back for the _Cinco Alimañas._ Somehow, though, held by my real, living father, safeguarded from the cold, I know that in spite of the tense, bizarre circumstances that brought me here, I’m wholly, completely accepted. 

It’s the single most wonderful, terrifying moment of my life. 

He pulls away eventually, and keeps his hands on my arms. “So, how about getting these photos taken? Photobooth is right around the corner here.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Again, though — no serious faces.”

“Got you covered,” he tells me, leading the way around the siding of a brick building. Sure enough there’s the booth.

We get a reel of photos taken, making all manner of stupid faces (blown-up cheeks, cheesing, the traditional eyes-crossed-tongue-out goofball expression.) We agree that “super serious faces” aren’t the same as seriously posing for a photo and so take one looking comically pensive, and another looking shocked and confused. We doctor them on the touchscreen with a number of filters and just like that, Dad hits the print key, and with a smile, hands me the photos.

“Want to hang on to those for now?” he asks.

I nod and can’t help but smile, as well. As the saying goes, screenshots or it didn’t happen. But now, I have legit photo evidence that my father exists in my hands. When I’m able to figure a way to manage it, I can’t wait to show these to Alma and Cerdo. 

As we walk back toward the car, Grayson looks over at me, and worms his lip.

“So…” he says, “I hate to do this to you, Lourdes, but… Okay. We need to get a room ready for you at home, which means cleaning out the spare bedroom that’s effectively become a floor-to-ceiling closet full of junk we haven’t looked at in roughly ten years. I guess we could consider leaving all that crap in there and set up a little pad for you down in the basement, but not only do I feel like you should have some say in where your living quarters get established in the house, it’s also something to discuss with the missus. And that’s kind of what I’m trying to get at — I _really_ need to talk to my wife about this, and I don’t know about your thoughts on the subject, but my feeling is that it’s better I drop the news that I have a daughter who’s moving in tonight — not tomorrow, not after excavating the spare room, _tonight —_ in person.”

“I’d say that’s worthy of an in-person notification,” I say. 

“Agreed. Hard to stay whelmed when you hear that one on the phone. And… considering the surprise alone might send her through the roof or the stratosphere or briefly off to the afterlife and I might need to perform CPR a few times before it sinks in, it _might_ be better if I drop this on her alone before I introduce you guys. And I don’t really want to just leave you in the garage or the back yard until I give you the signal it’s okay to bust in, so… You up for meeting one of your uncles, possibly two?” 

A part of me is excited to hear that I have uncles (it’s not like Tía Constanza ever had so much as an acquaintance who happened to be a dude after her husband died maybe twenty years before I was born), but the other part freaks out epically that Grayson/Dad, for now my acting security blanket in this strange new state, is going to leave me with a total stranger while he drops the scandalous news of my existence on his wife. I don’t even know my stepmother’s name, and honestly, the fact that I have to be fobbed off on an unknown uncle for who knows how long while he eases the lady into the news bugs the crap out of me. I know this is a big piece of news, but I'm a little miffed he doesn't want me there while he talks to his wife about me.

I don’t, however, wish to show any sort of remotely negative response to my father or risk upsetting him in the first few hours of knowing him, so I just nod. “Sure, okay.”

“I’m _really_ sorry, Lourdes,” Dad says, holding the passenger door open for me. “I know it’s not fair to run out on you like this, especially under the circumstances, but I promise, it _won’t_ be for long. It’s more or less just to talk things over with Barbara and get some plans in motion. That aside, you said you like to read and game, right?” I nod, and he closes the door. Sliding into the driver’s seat, he continues, “Well, my brother Jason’s got walls full of books double-stacked on shelves and enough piles _off_ the shelves they’ve become something like kudzu all over his apartment floor. And my partner Gannon at the BPD happens to be my brother's common law husband — and he’s a bit of a gamer himself. Meaning you’ll have plenty of books and a whole plethora of video games and consoles in Gannon's impressive collection to get into while you’re there. So hopefully this won’t be like, an interim prison sentence or anything until I’m back to pick you up.”

Mollified and somewhat heartened, I nod. “Okay.” 

Dad/Grayson gives me that infectious grin. “If it helps… Jason is also kind of like the ‘cool uncle’ who’d totally provide an alibi for any form of teenage malfeasance. So if you ever want to sneak out of the house when you're living with Babs and me, he’ll no doubt be happy to cover for you and probably even give you cash and a ride.”

I laugh, now feeling a good deal better. “All right, then, officially sold now. Let’s go meet Tío Jason.” 

“Possibly Gannon, too, depending on how long this takes and when he gets home from work,” Dad says, and pulls out into traffic. “Hopefully that'll be the case. Gannon’s a mush — you’ll love him.”

I smirk. “A mush? Really?”

“A _total_ mush.”

“Hmm. I don't even know the guy, but I’m telling him you said that,” I say, grinning.

“I tell him that about ten times a day, actually,” Dad says.

I just snicker as he dials a text message into his phone, miraculously pulling off the feat of driving and texting without causing our untimely deaths. 

The somewhat mythic Uncles Jason and Gannon live in a cozy-looking brownstone townhouse overlooking the water, the whole building lined with trees. I can’t help but feel totally nervous all over again as we approach the door and my father knocks on its dark, reflective surface. 

A positively monolithic dude opens the door, and I feel my eyes widen. I’ve seen plenty of heavyweights in my day, each one bigger and more imposing than the next. This guy constitutes about ten of them in one thigh alone. His black hair is punctuated by a shock of white at the hairline. Green eyes narrow in confusion when they fall on me.

“Wait — _this_ is the favor you texted me about?” the giant asks, pulling a carton of cigarettes out of his back pocket. 

“Yep. Here in the flesh. Jason, meet Lourdes.”

Jason scowls. “Are you serious?”

I scowl right back.

“Dead serious,” Dad says cheerfully.

“For how long?”

“Couple hours, tops.”

“Dickie, I _don’t_ do babysitting.”

My father’s disposition doesn’t shift an inch. “I don’t know, I think you might do babysitting for five hundred straight-up.”

Jason deflates, and lets out a mouthful of smoke. “...Fine.” 

“Listen — I’ll let you in on the rest of the details when I come back to pick her up after I talk to Barbara.” Jason tilts his head with a quizzical look. Dad lifts a conciliatory hand. “Just don’t let her out of your sight, okay? Make sure she gets something to eat, too, if you would.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just because I don’t babysit doesn’t mean I don’t know how.” Jason turns to me. “Well, you wanna come in, kid?”

Dad gives me a reassuring smile and nudges my cheek. “Stay whelmed, Lourdes. It’ll be okay, promise. Jason’s not as rough as all that.” I try to smile back. My father gives me a quick hug. “I’ll be back in a little bit. Won’t be long.”

I make my way up the steps toward the mammoth that is my uncle, and look over my shoulder. Dad smiles and waves at me before getting in his car. I rubberneck as he drives off, and take a breath before I step into the foyer of the townhouse.

“So what’d Dickhead say your name was?” Jason asks, grounding out the cigarette on the stoop before he closes the door.

I blink, and can’t stop from huffing a snicker. Even for his words, he’s giving me what appears to be a warm enough smile, and the interior of the apartment is every bit as cozy as the outside — wooden floors that are old and scuffed but buffed to a gleam, battered but vibrant throw rugs, and as Dad promised, books everywhere, even here in the entryway. By the sweet, candle-like smell, Jason apparently doesn’t smoke inside.

“Uh, Lourdes,” I say in response to his question.

“Step on up, then, oh my Lourdy — welcome to Chateau Todd,” Jason says. “Sorry about my initial reaction. Just got some shit to do later and wasn’t anticipating this beforehand.”

I shrug. “Oh, that’s okay.”

“So are you hungry?” 

“Famished, actually,” I say. “I haven’t really eaten today. Or… yesterday, either.”

“Fuck’s sake,” Jason says. “Get your ass in here and sit down.”

I acquiesce, following him into the kitchen and sitting down at the dining table by the bay window. 

“What would you like?” he asks.

“Anything’s fine,” I say, struck with the fleeting sensation of being disoriented as I sit, watching the guy who’s apparently my uncle putter around the kitchen.

“All right, grilled cheese, then,” he says. “Gannon the snob — aka my partner — just brought back a bunch of gouda with black truffle and I hit up that French patisserie for some decent bread the other day. Makes a _really_ good grilled cheese.” 

“Black truffle?” I ask. “As in those fancy mushrooms pigs sniff out?”

“Yeah, you ever had ’em?”

“Uh, can’t say I have,” I laugh. “Not exactly a bougie type. I grew up in the LA ghetto.”

He laughs. “Well, from one street rat to another. But I’ll tell you this, girl, you haven’t had truffles, you haven’t lived,” he tells me. “It’s definitely been one benefit to being adopted by a rich dude. Let’s get some in front of ya, whaddaya say?”

I nod with increasing gusto, my comfort levels increasing. “Can I help?”

“Nah, you chill,” Jason says. “This is kinda how I find my chi.”

I chuckle, and observe my surroundings.

“Not to state the obvious and make myself out to be the crispiest cracker in the box, but… _man,_ you have a ton of books,” I say, gazing around with awe.

“Oh, hell, yeah,” Jason agrees, lighting up a burner and tossing some butter in a pan. “Every spare second I’ve got I either cook something or stick my nose in one of those things. You got a favorite?”

I smile. “Too many to count. I like _The Sun Sword_ series a lot right now.”

Jason grins. “ _Sun Sword,_ for real? Shit’s dark. How old are you?”

“Fifteen today, actually.”

“Oh, happy birthday,” Jason says. “We oughta be making you a cake to go with this grilled cheese.”

“Thanks,” I say, beaming in spite of myself. “Not necessary, though — I know this kinda got thrust on you, you don’t have to be super-nanny or anything.”

He looks over at me. “Oh, please, cake is… well, cake walk. So, speaking of none or some of that, how did Dickie come upon you and decide to have you hang out here of all places for the afternoon? You in witness protection or something?”

I consider, and drum my fingers. Something about how my father went about dropping me off here makes me wonder if I should operate with some form of secrecy until Dad tells Jason himself, but at the same time, I know Jason will find out sooner or later, and in this exact moment, I have no idea what to say to attempt a cover, anyway. 

“Umm… well, it’s kind of a funny story,” I tell Jason. “I’m his daughter.”

No sooner has the _er_ sound left my mouth that it’s joined by the wet _splat_ of a pile of cheese hitting the floor, sliding out of Jason’s hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Si, hablo español con fluidez: Yeah, I speak Spanish fluently.  
> ¿Por qué? Soy una gamberra total: Why? I'm a total punk.  
> Una gamberra: A punk (f)  
> Chicas: Girls  
> Cinco Alimañas: Five Creeps


	3. Here's Brucie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hullo to all, and all my thanks to the lovely and wonderful aj_mcleod for being the most awesomest beta in all the world. :-) Happy reading!!
> 
> Xoxoxoxoxoxo,  
> ~EF <3

**CHAPTER 3 — “Here’s Brucie”**

  
  


_Dick_

  
  


Driving down to Blüdhaven, I’m in a suspended, floating daze — sweating and freezing, exhausted and wired, atoms at zero gravity and limbs dead weight all at once. My heart bangs in a wild fit against my ribs. My palms are tacky against the steering wheel. 

Barbara is at home waiting for me, following the text I sent her bearing the dread words _We need to talk._ Every red light, halt in traffic, and Sunday driver set my nerves on edge. If I know Babs, and I do, this talk won’t go _poorly_ per se, but it _will_ tear the skin off so many wounds — wounds that never truly heal.

It’s a literal eternity before I finally make it to the house Babs and I proudly purchased twelve years ago. It’s a little two-story Colonial in the lone decent patch of settlement in the Haven. I stop in the driveway and remove my hands from the steering wheel, settling into some box breathing. I need it just to come down off trying not to blow my lid at traffic, and moreover just _somewhat_ assimilate the events of the day. I still can’t seem to fully wrap my head around the idea that my life just took an upheaving turn, one wild and unnavigable, but somehow into a territory I longed for only months ago. 

I lower my head to the steering wheel. It seems strange, incomprehensible, even, that Barbara and I fought to make it into this same territory for years and years and years — only to accept, heartbroken, that parenting was one terrain we’d never explore together. Adoption was placed on the table, but after the repeated miscarriages followed by all the failed attempts at pregnancy through fertility drugs and IVF, Barbara quickly shelved the idea and stated that she just wanted to try to move on. I was too heartsick to argue. 

And then, a year later… along comes Lourdes.

I get out of the car, and close the driver’s side door. I stand a moment with my hand resting on the surface of the window. I breathe again through another powerful rush of disorientation, one that gives me the sense I’ve left the ground and am spiraling up to the stratosphere with no hope of stopping my uncontrollable ascent. How can you love someone that you only met a few hours ago so utterly and completely — and someone who came to you from the darkest days of your life, the days you want so desperately to forget, but simply _can’t?_

I sigh, and close my eyes a moment. Regardless of the dark origins of this unexpected gift, I find myself already wholeheartedly devoted to the daughter I never knew I had, aboveboard and no holds barred.

To say my head aches with the strain of processing the idea that Catalina Flores, the woman who left countless unhealed wounds on my heart and scarcely faded, permanent scars on my body, would be the one to bear me the ultimate gift before she passed on would understate it. 

I wander into the house, scarcely feeling the ground under my feet.

“Dick?”

Babs’ voice greets me, coming from the kitchen. I can smell coffee, and I swear my mouth waters at the scent. I could _inhale_ a cup right about now.

“Hi, babe,” I say, coming up to where she sits at the kitchen table, her gorgeous hair gleaming in its coppery cascade to her slim shoulders. I kiss her cheek, noting the crutches resting against the wall behind her. Movement is at about a five out of ten today, apparently — at least she doesn’t need the chair, which is often the case on bitterly cold, damp days like this one. Years of experimental treatments and physical therapy have yielded some enormous results, but still not a full cure for her spinal injury.

“So what’s up?” she asks, cocking her head as I pour a cup of coffee from the decanter, add some sugar, and sip with a profound relief. “You look like you literally just caught a glimpse of the apocalypse — is the League on high alert to the arrival of Wormwood or something?”

I shake my head, take a breath, and then decide to just cut to the chase. No sense in delaying the inevitable, and Barbara just chucked the ball conveniently into my court, anyway. 

“Well, what color do you want to paint the kid’s room — pink or purple?” I ask.

She chuckles. “Isn’t that the way nice ladies of society break the news of pregnancy to the clueless gentlemen in their lives?”

I give her a Look, and shrug. “Or vice versa.”

There’s a moment of quiet as she eyes me, her brows lowering with equal parts curiosity, amusement, and skepticism.

“Dick… _what_ exactly are you talking about?” she asks. “Did you just go out and adopt a kid off the street this morning?”

I sigh. “Not exactly.” I come over, and sit at the table with Barb, who frowns at me over her own mug of coffee. Now that the time to make the proclamation is at hand, I can’t find the words for it.

“Honey,” she says quietly, “what’s going on?”

I look at her, holding her gaze a moment.

“So… this morning, a girl came into the department asking for me,” I say. “Her mother and great-aunt had both passed away recently, and she was hoping to find her father.”

Babs half-smiles, and gives me a knowing nod. “Ahhh. I can guess pretty comfortably at where this is heading — you’re hoping to try adopting this girl?”

I feel sick, unable to smile back. “Barbara… the girl’s mother was Catalina Flores.”

The half-smile literally _falls_ from Babs’ face. “Wait — Catalina was her mother? How is that possible?”

I heave another sigh. “I guess Catalina didn’t actually die on the beach that night Jason shot her.”

Barbara stares at me, a million emotions rushing across the surfaces of her eyes. “Dick, she _had_ to have. It couldn’t possibly have gotten past both of us for _sixteen years_ that she’d survived.”

I rub at my aching forehead. “Well, Babs, somehow it did. Looking into it, Cat did, in fact, survive a freaking headshot and then went on to live out her days at San Diego Women’s Correctional.”

Babs shakes her head. “Legit a goddamn cat — nine lives and everything. And wait — you said she was in _California?”_ Barbara looks even more flabbergasted. “How many jurisdiction issues were violated in this one single indictment and incarceration?”

“Some poor sap had to fill out a couple mountains of paperwork to see _that_ one facilitated,” I joke feebly. 

“And you’re telling me she had a baby in this time?”

I nod. “A girl. Lourdes. She’s fifteen years old today.”

Barbara stares at me, a look of realization and horror coming over her whitening face. “Oh, no, Dick…”

Again, I nod, and rest my face in my hand. “Yeah. I did the math already, babe.” 

Barb rubs at her temples. “She’s yours.”

I nod. “No room for doubt. Thompkins did a paternity test, and…” I shrug helplessly and lift my hands. “It’s a girl.”

Barbara eyes me, a dark, unhappy glint in her eye. “And according to the math… from the night on the roof.”

I slump in my chair. “That’s right.”

“…God, Dick.”

“Yeah.”

She reaches across the table to cover my hand with hers. We sit like this for a series of wordless moments, the silence thick with our thoughts.

“…Where is she now?” Barb breaks the quiet.

“I dropped her off with Jason for the time being. Just until I could talk to you and then go back to pick her up.”

Babs sighs — a long, heavy, emotional sigh. “So… I take it it’s time to clean out the spare room?”

“Yeah. Or get a little teenage pad ready in the basement,” I say. I look at my wife. “…I’m not sending her back to California, Barb. And I’m not leaving her out in the cold, either.”

Barbara gives me a fierce look in return. “Dick, of _course_ you’re not. She’s your daughter. I wouldn’t expect anything different.”

“Okay… but how do _you_ feel about this?” I ask. “And kindly be honest.”

“You know me, I’m always honest,” she says, squeezing my hand. “And with all my characteristic honesty… I don’t really know how I feel. I mean… I’d thought we’d left Catalina as far behind us as we could have, all things considered, and I was _more_ than satisfied to keep that door closed forever. But with this… it’s like that door’s been opened, and will never be closed again.” She sighs. “But regardless of that, Dick, it’s _not_ this girl’s fault. She never asked to be here. And however she might have come about, or how either of us feels about it, the fact remains that she’s here, and she’s yours, and she needs her father.” 

I smile at Barb, somewhat heartened. “And her stepmom.”

She smiles back. “Yeah.”

I toss out a sigh to rival Babs’ earlier. “So… time to start nesting. Better get ready to hit up Bob’s Furniture Outlet and drop a substantial wad of cash later, Mama Bear.”

She nods and knocks back the rest of her coffee. “Yep. No rest for the wicked.”

I chuckle a bit, then indicate the crutches as I stand up. “How are you feeling, speaking of? You up to the task?”

She waves a hand. “Oh, yeah. Just a little weak-ish in the quads and stiff in the knees and sore in the lower back. We can thank the lovely, temperate Blüdhaven weather for that one.” She pauses, and frowns. “You know, Dick, before we get moving… I have to speak now, or forever hold my peace. Something about this whole thing rubs me the wrong way.”

Strangely, this lights something unexpected in me — an immediate need to jump to Lourdes’ defense if need be. I frown back at her. “What do you mean?”

“Just — something’s hinky. Or just plain rotten in the state of New Jersey — sorry, but I refuse to believe that _none_ of us was aware that Catalina survived,” Barbara says. “And that she somehow wound up in California of all places — in a correctional facility all the way across the friggin’ country? Some _serious_ strings had to have been pulled to see that happen. Not to mention keep it quiet for sixteen years — and those strings doubtless got pulled by throwing influence, power, bargaining chips, and money at them, among other things.”

My guts sink. This is something that’s chewed at the back of my mind, trying to call attention to itself, its teeth lost in the noise of everything else happening in the fore. Beneath its weight, I sink back down into my chair.

“…You think Bruce was behind this?” I ask.

She looks helplessly at me. “It’s all I can think of that makes _any_ sense in this whole messed up equation.”

I stand back up, heat starting in my middle, fanning in vibrating waves through my limbs. “You think he knew about Lourdes?”

Barbara thins her lips, and spreads her hands. “I don’t know, Dick. But listen, babe, Bruce possibly knowing about all this isn’t clinched yet — maybe you should go talk to him. If nothing else, it’ll at least shed some light on the situation.”

My fists clench, and I stand a moment, my jaw working.

“Trust me, I have _every intention_ of talking to him about this,” I growl, my voice low and quiet, the quality it takes on when I’m _really_ fighting a towering ire.

Babs’ expression mirrors mine. “Keep me posted, okay? I’m going to start on getting the house ready.”

I nod, already on my way out the door.

  
  
  



	4. Here's Dickie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, all!
> 
> Shout-out to my bestie and the wonderful AJ_McLeod for their wonderful proofs and betas. <3 ^_^ Love y'all! 
> 
> Enjoy... and stay healthy, loves. <3 I hope all of you are doing okay in this trying time. If you're unwell, get better soon, if you're going bonkers in isolation or are feeling low in any way, please don't hesitate to reach out. Lots of love to all. <3
> 
> Xoxoxoxoxoxoxo,  
> EF <3

  


**CHAPTER 4 — “Here’s Dickie”**

  
  


_Dick_

  
  


“Ah, Master Dick!”

Alfred’s voice has grown only slightly reedier over the years, but it doesn’t affect its warm quality as he smiles at me where I stand on the threshold.

“Hi, Alfred,” I say, stepping inside and giving him a quick one-armed hug. “Sorry to bust in unannounced like this, but is Bruce in? I _really_ need to talk to him.”

“He is, sir — down below at the moment,” Alfred replies. “Go on down. When you’ve come back up, I’ll have a pot of coffee for you.” 

“Oh, I appreciate that, Alfred, thanks,” I say, smiling, but unable to mask my underlying distress.

Alfred, whom I’ve never been able to fool (regardless of whether I advertise my emotions already, anyway), gives me a knowing look.

“Is everything all right, Master Richard?” he asks.

I stand a moment, and sigh.

“Not really, Alfred,” I tell him honestly. 

“What’s the matter, then?” he asks kindly. “Would you prefer to have the coffee now, have a bit of a chat before you approach Master Bruce? The old pre-gaming, as you called it when you were younger?”

I consider. I want to — delaying the confirmation of ugly, possible truths by turning to Alfred for a while tempts me. But there’s so much here that I don’t know if a pot of coffee will last the amount of time necessary for a sufficient pre-gaming session — and that aside, spending too much time up top in the manor with Alfred gives Bruce more ample time to give me the slip to go on nightly patrol in his customary way.

I also am scared of what I might find. If Bruce knew about Lourdes, and told Alfred… 

_No,_ I tell myself. _No way. Alfred would never have kept this from me._

Still.

“I wish I could,” I say. “But I _really_ need to talk to him, and _now.”_

“All right, Master Dick,” Alfred says. “I’ll have the coffee ready when you’re through.”

I nod and tell him thank you, then make my way down to the cave.

“Bruce,” I call as I round the catwalk over the main room. He sits at the control panel, studying the central monitor. Turning to hear my voice, he frowns as I come thundering down the steps in a tremendous clatter.

I waste no time.

“Catalina was alive for the past sixteen years and only died two months ago?” I snap, coming to a halt and standing in front of him before he has a chance to say anything. I take a breath. “You didn’t think that was information I _might_ find relevant?”

There’s a long, long, _long_ pause, as he sits, gazing at me, his face a hard, unmoving slab. His eyes glint, as ever inscrutable minus the slightest twitch in one eyelid, perceptible only under the vibrant illumination of a nearby computer screen. I stand my ground, and cross my arms over my chest, forcing restraint and encouraging myself to remain as still as possible. Even as I do so, I want nothing more than to just crash around like a raging chimpanzee and wreak primordial havoc all over the place. Bruce’s impassivity fuels this urge — the _silence_ and _stoicism_ are as good a signature verifying his guilt than blubbering a gajillion apologies and confessions would be. 

_Finally —_ Bruce sighs, and passes a hand over his face. “Dick,” he says. “It was information I felt was relevant to _protect_ you from.”

I stare in shocked silence a moment, and then snort loudly. “Well, congratulations, Father of the Year. You just protected me from knowing I had a _daughter_ for fifteen fucking years, too. And you protected _her_ from knowing she had a living, breathing _father_ for her entire life as well — just to put a little shit cheese on top of this here shit sandwich.” I lower my arms, both extending from my sides, and _not_ because I’m posturing — like it or not, I’m seconds from a fight, and oh, my body is ready. “Did you know about _that_ part? And tell me the truth.”

Silence.

And that same impassivity, that same inscrutability, that same _infuriating_ wordlessness.

“Bruce,” I growl, my body now vibrating visibly. “ _Did you?”_

Again, he sighs.

“Yes.”

A strobing, psychotropic flash of red later, I find myself on my back, grappling balls to the wall with Bruce, his face _still_ impassive as ever, minus the fact that — to my fleeting but _intense_ satisfaction — one eye is reddened and enlarged, portending an absolutely stunning shiner later, and his nose is out of place and bleeding profusely. I am, however, at something of a disadvantage now — there’s _no one_ equal to Bruce in grappling, and while I’m smaller, faster, and more agile, my foster father (freaking _Batman)_ is heavier, stronger, and far more proficient on the ground. I can hold my own in a grapple, thanks to my bodily flexibility and endurance, but my forte lies in striking, rushing in fleet-footed and landing a series of blows before darting back out of the fray with equal speed. If Bruce gets me in a choke and keeps me on the ground, this fight will be over so quickly it will be like it never started.

I’m aware of him speaking — _Dick, calm down, calm down, stop, listen to me —_ but his words translate to nothing intelligible in this crazed moment. All that flies through my brain in any sort of discernible manner is the need to defend against Bruce’s offensive and get back on my feet where I can _finish_ this job. This goes beyond his normal reticence, already enough to light the fuse and blow my dynamite sky-high. This is something I can’t even _begin_ to comprehend or make sense of — let alone forgive or even lend an ear to.

I twist and drive a knee into his abdominals, something that might not have made him flinch ten years ago, but now in his senior citizen status causes him to huff slightly and slacken his hold the tiniest bit. I flip out from beneath him, my neck snagging in the crook of his arm on the way. Maddened at this point, I start struggling like a caged animal, thrusting an elbow with all my strength into his ribs. I feel a shift under the blow, hear a pop _thunk_ dully. His breath catches, but trained and seasoned as he is, his grip doesn’t loosen. 

“ _Dick.”_

His voice hisses into my ear, the pressure against my throat unbearable. I arch my back, lift both legs, and kick them out, thrusting our compiled weight backwards. The soles of his shoes skid over the stone floor. My efforts fail to accomplish the desired end, given our enormous weight differential. I hurl one heel down into his instep, causing a grunt and another audible pop, but still he doesn’t loosen his grip.

“Dick, if choking you unconscious is what it takes to get you to settle down and _listen,_ don’t think I won’t do it —”

I peel at his fingers, again lift off both heels, and snap my head back into his face. With every inch of strength I possess, I bow my spine and bend my knees, at last bringing Bruce’s weight atop my back with success as I lower to the floor. I twist, painfully wrenching my neck and head from beneath his bent arm. I stagger to my feet, barking some coughs as I fight to regain my breath. Stepping back, red-faced and bleeding, Bruce raises his hands in a palliative gesture.

“Dick,” he says, “ _please_ , just let me explain.”

I step forward, triple feint two straight body shots and a mid-level uppercut, then catch him with a left hook in a glancing blow across his ear and the back of his skull. It’s not a perfect hit, given Bruce’s nigh impenetrable defense, but I can see it landed, and landed _hard._ His ear is already shorn and bleeding — meaning perfectly fine by me. 

“Explain _that,_ you fucking asshole,” I snarl. “And if you explain it as anything other than _totally_ deserved, you’re gonna swallow your damn teeth next.”

He looks good and angry now, his jaw set under the thin line of his mouth. “Are you done?”

My shoulders heave with my infuriated breath. “Not by a long shot, you old bastard.”

“Then maybe you ought to walk away before you try confronting me again,” he tells me. “This isn’t going to accomplish anything, Dick — for God’s sake, I’m on _your_ side.”

I stare incredulously, then burst into a bout of embittered laughter. “On my side? On _my_ side? Are you _kidding?_ Bruce, do you even _hear_ yourself? I mean, my daughter grew up with some great-aunt who apparently forced her into a totally ridiculous facsimile of Fundie existence _and_ regularly called her a punk! In what sounds like the damn _ghetto,_ no less! Not to mention, she had to go visit her mother _in jail_ with _that_ old Gestapo windbag for emotional support! I mean, gee, Pop-Pop, wouldn’t it have been beneficial to _my daughter_ to know her father and his entire family were there the whole time and would have _happily_ taken care of and raised her if they’d _known_ she was there? And _without_ all the stifling and the insults and the restricting and the control —”

“Dick, you can’t look me in the face and tell me that any tie to Catalina Flores that wasn’t under _tight_ lock and key would have been anything but utterly and completely dangerous to you. That’s not even getting into the ramifications of knowing she was alive —”

“What ramifications!” I bellow, gesticulating wildly. “Learning I had a daughter? Being able to raise her? Being able to be there for her? Being able to be a _father_ to her?” I’m approximately a Planck length from throwing more fisticuffs Bruce’s way. “Under tight lock and key — you mean under _your_ control! God forbid anything _ever_ escape _your_ control — not to mention…” Tears start flooding my eyes now in spite of myself. “Do you have _any idea_ what Lourdes would have meant to Barbara and me eleven years ago when we lost our first pregnancy, or eight years ago when we lost our second, and what about _John,_ Bruce? You think not knowing about my daughter did us _any favors_ then?” My fists clench as my entire body locks up. “Not to mention every failed IVF and hormone treatment and surgery after —” I throw a fist into one of his monitors in a blast of substrate, not caring about my knuckles or the damage. I’m sobbing now, whether I want to or not.

When Bruce speaks, his voice is unwontedly gentle — achieving its uncommon quality of paternity I always crave. He doesn’t seem remotely bothered by the loss of his monitor, nor by my outward displays of rage and grief. 

“Listen to me, Dick,” he murmurs. “It wasn’t out of not _wanting_ to tell you, especially given the losses you and Barb suffered over the years. It was out of feeling that I _couldn’t_ tell you — and moreover, that I shouldn’t.”

I swipe at my soaking cheeks and gape at him, unmoved by the fatherly tone I normally desire from him. “Are you serious? How on God’s green earth can you even _start_ justifying that statement?”

“Dick, Catalina damaged you in ways that I don’t even know _you’re_ aware of. I think we can agree that you’ve never been the same since — _don’t_ pretend you don’t still look around corners for her from time to time. I know you jump now and then when your phone rings, I know you think on her every time Matt’s and Blockbuster’s anniversaries come around, and I _know_ you remember her when you wind up in the hospital with a respiratory infection or get winded just from working out. You still have no social media, you still never speak to the press, and you’ve made _zero_ new friends — deliberately — since. And don’t think Barbara hasn’t told me about your occasional anxiety attacks that generally correspond with certain dates or other reminders pertaining to Catalina.”

I’m silent. The truth is, Bruce has me there. I sniff irritably as my nose runs. 

“I learned she survived the gunshot immediately after you were admitted to the hospital that night — but she was comatose, and frankly, all too likely a goner, so I never thought to tell you differently,” he continues. “When she _woke_ from that coma, I was up at your bedside every night, coaxing you through the aftermath of all those nightmares and night terrors, and I was with you every day, walking you through your at-home physical therapy and ensuring you took your medications until you were somewhat back on your feet. Even then, it fell to all of us to _continue_ to help you heal, something all of us are _still_ doing. I just couldn’t see how you learning that Catalina was still alive would do anything other than bring you serious harm and stall whatever progress you’ve made over the years.”

I grit my teeth and take a breath. “Bruce — I _get_ that part. What I don’t — and _can’t_ — get is how you could ever believe that keeping my daughter from me was the right thing to do, here.” 

He sighs. “I’m going to speak plainly —”

“When do you ever do anything else, other than when you’re not speaking at all?”

He ignores me. “Your daughter came from what could be comfortably classified as a _rape_ , Dick. You didn’t consent to relations with Catalina, and as such you never consented to the possibility of a child or furthermore the existence of a child. I didn’t feel it was right for the care of a baby to be _forced_ on you by a crime.”

I swallow the lump in my throat and close my eyes a moment when the action threatens to launch my cookies all over the keyboards and floor. When I’ve gotten it together, I inhale. “Bruce, it would never have been _forced_ on me. _None_ of that was Lourdes’ fault. It’s not like she asked to be here. Regardless of whether I —” I make the quote motions, “ _consented to a child_ or not, she’s still exactly that — a child, _my_ child. She needed, and _needs,_ to be loved and cared for, and as her father…” I trail off and heave a hard sigh. “I mean, you managed to punish the single most innocent party in this whole equation with that little stunt.”

“Maybe, and maybe not,” Bruce says. He _sounds_ composed, but I don’t miss the slight heaviness in his voice, having spent years learning to read him. “What I observed was that she was in the care of a great-aunt, she was kept in good health, her marks were excellent, and she was never in trouble. All signs of a child properly cared for. Meanwhile, Catalina was across the country from you in a correctional facility in California — sentenced to life without parole and under stringent NDAs and protective orders. So, it appeared to me that no one was truly punished but Catalina herself — as it should have been.”

“Oh, come off it,” I snap. “You don’t actually believe that — I repeat, do you even _hear_ yourself? You punished Lourdes, you punished me, you punished Barbara, you punished yourself — you punished _everyone_ in this entire messed up situation.”

He gazes at me a moment. “Dick. I never saw what I did as punishment.”

“What was it, then, Bruce? What did you see it as?”

“I saw it as protecting you.”

I hold his gaze for a long time, sorting out my thoughts, not encountering any discomfort in spite of the prolonged stare.

When I’ve sorted myself (somewhat) out, I speak. “Why is it that your version of protecting me always ends up feeling like it punishes not only me, but everyone around me, too?”

He doesn’t respond, not outwardly giving any indication of a reaction, but I see his jaw working in the light from the hololenses beside him. After a time, I let go a sigh.

“I don’t want to see you for a while,” I state. “I won’t keep Lourdes from you — she ought to know her grandfather. Keeping you from her is only going to hurt _her_ in the end, and honestly, she’s been hurt too much already. But as for me, I don’t know if I can talk to you, or even _look_ at you for I don’t even know how long. If you want to see your granddaughter, set it up through Barbara or Alfred.”

I leave Bruce in the cave, the tears now coming hot and fast, all of the emotions of the day catching up to and overtaking me. By the time I reach the den in the manor, I fall into a chair by the fireplace, and push my face into my hands — hands I’m only just noticing are severely injured; warped and stiff and bloody.

Alfred’s aging voice now enters my ears, still his, and still one of the most welcome and comforting sounds in the world.

“There now, Master Dick,” he murmurs to me, sitting down beside me on the sofa. 

“I can’t believe this, Alfred,” I sob.

“Nor can I.”

I quiet as I look over at him.

“I’ve got a confession, I’m afraid,” he explains. “You’ll have to forgive my intrusion, but I overheard everything down below when I decided to come down and bop the coffee over.” He inhales. “…Imagine my surprise when I happened upon what appeared to be the next Great War — and moreover, its cause.” 

This, somehow, starts the tears back up. Alfred allows me to lean on him as I so often have over the years and rests a hand on my back.

“Normally I’d have broken it up,” he continues, “but from the sounds of it, the two of you needed to hash it out, as it were. It wasn’t for me to play referee this time.”

I just shake my head. The reality was that there likely was no need for an intervention, anyway. If Bruce _truly_ wanted to overpower me, things would have unfolded very differently in the cave. 

“That being said… let’s get you looked after,” Alfred tells me. “Your hands are in a right state, I must say. Truly unloaded some heat on Master Bruce — I daresay he’ll also need some tending to after this.”

I just stand, and follow Alfred to the kitchen, where he performs his world-famous, miraculous first aid on my battered hands. I focus on breathing, taking in a four-seven-eight pattern, soothing under the feeling of Alfred’s doctoring and coming down off the enormous row that just made a minor wreck of the Bat Cave. I gaze out the window, watching the falling snow, allowing the slow-paced, calming sight to assuage my wracked, bunched, quivering nerves.

“Alfred,” I say after a while. “Did you know I have a daughter?”

“Up until the scene in the cave, I did not, sir. Catalina’s, I gathered?”

I take a breath and look up at the ceiling. “Yeah. I just found out about her this morning.”

“Might I ask how?”

“Well, I sure didn’t find out from Bruce, who incidentally knew about her from the very beginning,” I sigh.

Alfred’s lips thin. “Is that right, then?”

I nod.

“Well. Then you were _very_ correct to throw such a tremendous wobbly.”

I chuckle half-heartedly at this Britishism. Alfred’s been in the States for decades but has admirably retained his native dialect. 

Somehow, the knowledge that Bruce kept his knowledge of Lourdes even from Alfred — who is the lone person inducted into the exclusive “Wayne Circle of Trust” that he tells _everything,_ usually — cools my ire… slightly. _Very_ slightly. 

“Yeah. He _really_ committed to this one. Anyway… Her name is Lourdes, and she just kind of showed up at the BPD out of nowhere this morning. Knocked me for a pretty massive loop.” I pause. “…I’m _still_ processing it, to be honest.”

Alfred chuckles. “Well, I would imagine so — and I fear you may be processing it for some time yet. Now, she’s fifteen, from what I extrapolated before I respectfully withdrew?”

“Fifteen today, actually.”

Alfred gives me a gentle smile under his mustache. “Well, why on earth are you still here, then, Master Dick? Best run along, and tout-suite, at that. You’ve got an important birthday to celebrate.”

I take a breath, and nod. I flex my hands under the bandages on my knuckles. They’ll be okay, just sore and stiff and scuffed up for a few days. “Yeah. Better get back. I’ve missed enough birthdays already.” 

“One thing I will ask, however, before you head out,” Alfred tells me.

“What’s that?” I ask, making my way to the foyer, feeling now marginally better.

“Promise me that in spite of the circumstances, you will bring that girl around the first moment you find free — I can’t go long without meeting the young lady who is, for all purposes, my great-granddaughter. I will safeguard you from Master Bruce if necessary.”

I laugh a bit, and hug Alfred with some force, squeezing him in gratitude. “How do you always manage to fix every situation ever, Alfred?”

He chuckles. “Oh, I’m far from a fixer, Master Dick. But I appreciate the thought, all the same.”

I pull away, and smile. “Well. It’s the truth, if you ask me. Thanks for everything.”

“Of course, Master Richard. Now. Go on, then.”

I do, in a humor enormously improved from even just a few minutes ago.

  
  
  



	5. Round Two: Meet and Greet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiya, everyone!
> 
> AJ_MCLEOD IS A PRECIOUS ANGEL AND EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW! Thanks for picking up on the continuity thing... you're wonderful <3
> 
> Have some fluff, everyone. :-3 Enjoy!
> 
> Xoxoxoxoxoxo,  
> EF

**CHAPTER 5 — “Round Two: Meet and Greet”**

  
  


_Lourdes_

  
  


Just as I’m crowing with glee and falling backwards with my brand-new uncle, Gannon, clasped helplessly in a perfect bow-and-arrow choke, the sound of the front door opening and closing resounds throughout the townhouse. My father’s voice follows with a tired, but friendly sounding, “Hello…”

Jason looks up from where he stands at the counter, slathering cream around the edges of the birthday cake we made together (Black Forest cake — which I’ve never had, but he maintains I’ll love, given my affinity for cherry pie.)

“Ah, if it ain’t Father Dickhole himself,” he says, smiling his charming, crooked smile as Dad enters the kitchen. “Come to grace us with his paternal presence — dude. What the hell happened to you? You look like you just came back from a dinner date with Jaws.”

Gannon and I pause in our grapple, and I gape at Dad. His hands are bandaged, and his face looks reddened even from the room over.

“Eh, you should see the other guy,” Dad says, falling into a chair at the kitchen table. "We can discuss it in greater detail later."

Uncle Jason nods slowly. “Ah. Cops in the BPD, I swear. Between you and my cupcake over there I oughta qualify to be an LPN by now. Nothing to see here, go back to back to your grapple, kids.”

Dad smiles as he watches me go all in on Gannon’s momentary distraction. “Anyway… Father Dickhole? Man, I swear I can’t keep _any_ secrets from you — but if that’s Black Forest cake I see you decorating there, you’re forgiven, ya freakin’ warlock.”

“Sorry, Papá, I told him —” I grunt as I push off the floor to keep my opponent under control, “the truth pretty much — off the bat — about you being my dad _and_ it — being my — _birthday —_ urgh —” _Thump._

Dad cocks his head as I wrangle Gannon into the floor.

“Well, that’s perfectly fine, but… what in the actual heck am I witnessing right now?” he asks, a grin breaking out across his face. 

I wave from where I clutch my new uncle _(ay caramba —_ pretty sure this is never going to really sink in), then joyfully proclaim, “I got him — I got him!”

Dad laughs as Gannon smacks clumsily at my wrist. I release him, both of us flopping to the rug in a fit of breathless giggles. 

“Chip off the old block, Dickie,” Gannon wheezes. “I’m just going to blame it on the fact that I’m getting old.”

“Well, that’s a fair assessment, _or_ you just suck at jiu-jitsu,” Jason says. “You know, I’ve offered a hundred times to work on that with you.”

“Hmph. I could crack a joke, but young ears are present,” Gannon says. 

“Pfff. I’m not _that_ young,” I laugh.

“Still young enough I can do this —” Gan grabs me under his arm and promptly gives me a _serious_ noogie, “and still young enough I can’t joke about certain varieties of wrestling with my fellow.”

I push him away, laughing, then start in on a baseball hold. I squeal when I’m wrested off. 

“Gannon! My damsel in distress! I’ll save you!” Dad exclaims, rolling me away from Gannon into a paper cutter hold.

“Dad!” I protest, still giggling as he does the same. His hold is gentle — I can get out at any moment I choose, so I do, twisting away and just full-on tackling him. 

“Dude, you all are gonna wreck the furniture,” Jason gripes from the kitchen. “That aside, how long have we all known each other, exactly? It seems a little early for grappling the living room into complete destruction.”

Dad chuckles, rolling away. He pats my arm. “The guy makes a fair point. That aside, I told Barb we’d be home shortly, so we should probably quit the UFC before we’ve imparted a natural disaster on your uncles’ place.”

“Not to mention, cake’s done,” Jason announces. “Get your asses over here and partake in this masterpiece before you leave.”

We file into the kitchen, and I smile when Dad gives me a squeeze by wrapping an arm around my shoulder. He compliments my grappling, which only makes me smile wider as I tell him thanks. I ask about his hands and his face (which upon closer inspection is _full_ of busted capillaries), but he assures me it’s nothing to worry about. I’m curious, but I leave it be, sensing it’s nothing he wants to discuss. 

Sitting at the table, I feel more disoriented than ever — but strangely _happy_ as we all tuck into the cake at the little dining table.

This whole day has been a complete whirlwind — just this morning I stepped off the Greyhound bus an orphaned runaway, and now here I am in my uncles’ kitchen, eating, chatting books, baking, playing video games, and joke-tussling with Uncle Jason and Gannon. Not to mention devouring the single most life-altering cake I’ve ever encountered, and this while full of the equally life-altering grilled cheese. Double bonus, Dad wasn’t wrong when he described Gannon as a mush that I’d love — while he was equally floored to hear of my relation to his partner, he absorbed the shock quickly, and proved himself remarkably easy to bond with. 

I’ve never found it easy to connect with others — while I certainly wasn’t the only fatherless child I ever knew, and neither was I the only one with an incarcerated parent, there was always a sense of _separation_ from others that I experienced everywhere I went. I could never really discern what this sense of difference stemmed from, and I _did_ consider the possibility that I’d read a few too many young adult mythical monster romance series with their woebegone heroines that all suffered from self-imposed, puffed up social isolation. But my feeling of being a misfit didn’t gel with that flavor of outcast — more the sense that I existed as someone suspended between one world and another, fully incorporated into neither, therefore not truly reachable. The only people who have ever _reached_ me are Soos, Alma, and Cerdo, and more recently, Sister Nancy.

Today, however, I have felt _rooted_ — as though I at last descended from Planet Lourdes and onto the earth. Houston, we have a landing. 

I felt comfortable, _really_ comfortable with Jason and Gannon shortly after meeting them, and with my father… I felt _home._ As though his presence was the tractor beam that finally drew me down to the earth, giving me a landing pad to settle upon. It seems too fast to feel this way, but I do, however surreal it might be.

I pause, taking a moment to attempt reintegrating. Reality seems suspended, as in _legit_ suspended, as I help wash up the dishes in spite of everyone’s insistence I not on account of my birthday. I let the water run over my hands a moment and side-eye the new men that are my family, wondering if this entire day has even been _real_. Any minute now I feel sure I’ll wake up on my bottom bunk at St. Margaret’s, forced out the door to school following a cafeteria-issued breakfast with people that won’t even glance my way. 

Realizing that I won’t be at the same school with the same class I’ve been with since kindergarten, that I won’t have immediate access to Soos and my friends, that my family aren’t the only new people I’ll be meeting… it all about yanks my feet out from under me, so I push that into the back of my mind to chew on later. I turn off the tap, dry off my hands, and smile at my dad (and it hits me. The wonder will never, ever fade. I think I can live with a little less familiarity — for now.)

“Well, kiddo, you ready to go?” he asks. 

“Home?” I query.

He nods, and smiles back at me. “Yep. Barbara’s getting the house ready — although if you’re up for it, we might make a few pit stops on the way back to Blüdhaven.”

“Sure,” I say, then turn to Jason and Gannon. “Well, _tíos,_ thanks _so much_ for everything.”

“Hey, you’re welcome,” says Jason, flicking my ponytail a bit. “Come back and see us anytime — you’re always welcome to crash here if Father Dickhole pulls your leash in too tight and you need some breathing room and or a safe space for some low-key teenage rebellion.”

I cover a laugh. Dad apparently didn’t lie about Jason, either.

“As always, Jay forgets he’s common law married to a cop,” Gannon chuckles. “But I second the motion — you’re always welcome here. Now come give me a hug, Niece Lourdes.”

I do, just as okay with hugging Gannon as I was Dad earlier. I never knew I had this in me — this level of ease with people, family or no. For as alien as it is, it feels good, too.

“Thanks for taking care of her, you guys,” says Dad, giving both Jason and Gannon hugs goodbye. “We’ll see you soon, okay?”

“Speaking of that, you coming in tomorrow?” Gannon asks. “I can cover if you need to take a few days.”

“I might, Gan, thanks,” Dad says. “I’ll get in touch with Amy later.”

“Man, she’s gonna need to get her jaw reattached,” Gannon chuckles. 

“Yeah, Amy and everyone else,” Dad agrees. He squeezes my shoulder, as though to reassure me (it works.) “It’s a _good_ shock, though.”

“I’ll say,” Jason agrees. “And you know me, kids are all right, but teenagers aren’t really my cup of tea.”

“Get used to this one being your cuppa,” Dad chides him facetiously. 

“Already am, Dickie. See ya, Oh My Lourdy,” Jason says, pinching my cheek. I give him a mock growly-type face. (And I think he’s the only person who will ever get away with calling me “Lourdy.”)

We file out, heading to the car. Once we’ve settled in and are pulling onto the road, I look over at Dad. 

“So… how did the missus take the news?” I ask. “Is she upset?”

Dad smiles over at me. “No. She’s not upset, Lourdes. Trust me, she’d let me know if she was.”

I smile, too, relieved, but still a little nervous about meeting my stepmom. 

“So while Babs is getting the house prepped,” Dad goes on, “I have a few ideas as to what we can do for your _Quince_.”

I stare. “Okay, but… I mean… Haven’t we already done stuff for my birthday?”

His turn to stare. “What do you mean?”

I squirm. “Well… we had the cake. Jason let me take a couple books. I guess that’s… about what I’m used to, maybe?”

Dad shakes his head. “Girl, you’re going to have to get used to a new normal — with me, you’re pretty much getting a birthday _week_ every year from here on out.” 

“ _Vaya,_ I feel like Cinderella,” I say, and chuckle a bit. “Just call me a Disney Princess.”

There’s a brief spell of quiet.

“Well,” Dad says to break the momentary silence, “I _did_ used to call your mom _princesa.”_

I cock my head, studying his face. He’s not good about hiding his feelings (again, just like me), and now it’s plain to see there’s a whole mixed bag of emotions scuttling all over his features. Sadness is the foremost of these, darkening his normally bright disposition. 

“You did?” I ask.

He glances over at me, and half-smiles. “Yeah.”

I shift, wondering if I should ask him about Mamá. I know there has to be _some_ kind of history, given that I’m very much here and I know darn well where babies come from. _When a man and woman love each other very much…_ The stork sure as heck didn’t just dump me on the threshold of my mom’s jail cell. However, there’s no feeling of positivity or happiness regarding my mother that _anyone_ has exhibited, least of all my father. Although I didn’t dig for details, I know my mom’s crimes were horrendously egregious… but Dad _had_ to have loved my mom once. 

“ _Princesa,”_ I say instead. “…What made you call her that?”

Dad’s quiet another moment, watching the road, and then he inhales.

“She was beautiful,” he says. “Smart. Had a big presence. Like… she’d walk in and the whole room would light up. So… it just fit.” 

I can’t help but go all warm inside, hearing this. 

“I don’t know if I’m a princess type like my mom, though,” I say. “So… no need to do the Disney birthday or anything.”

He looks over at me, his eyes twinkling, some of the darkness having left them now. “Okay, but what if _I_ want to?”

I notice he’s pulled the car into an enormous parking lot in front of a reaching office building. Cars are parked throughout, but the park is fairly uncluttered.

“What did you have in mind?” I ask, curious.

“Hop out,” he says, opening his door, “and trade me seats. I’m going to show you how to drive.”

I’m brought up short. “Umm — I don’t even have my temps…”

“That’s okay,” he says. “There has to be some benefit to being a cop, am I right? Might as well bend the rules for this case. And in six months you’ll have to take your temps test, anyway, so we may as well give you a crash course on the basics, get you prepped.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Crash course — literally. I’ve never even _sat_ in a driver’s seat.”

“I mean — we don’t _have_ to if you’re not comfortable,” Dad says, lifting his hands appeasingly. “I just thought —”

I laugh, cutting him off. “I didn’t say _that.”_

“Attagirl,” he says, and gives me a high five as we pass each other around the front of the car. “Let’s do this. Next step, Indie 500.”

Driving isn’t as terrifying as all that, it turns out. The lot is heavily salted (meaning “no drifts or donuts… yet”), the cars are spaced out enough that I don’t feel as though I’m about to take a bumper off just creeping along an aisle, and making all the seating adjustments actually comes fairly naturally. I remember my mom telling me about how her older brother taught her to drive, and that he continuously mashed the floor on the passenger side where the brakes would theoretically have been, clutching the panels and seats and oh-shit handles, freaking out to the point that the experience became a bit traumatic for her. Dad, however, is nothing but calm and level — infinitely patient, as though he draws from oceans upon oceans of equanimity. It makes it easy to learn the ropes, and before long, I’m tooling around the lot in Dad’s sedan with “the comfort of an old pro” as we listen to Joan Jett on high volume. 

“So! You ready to drive all the way to Blüdhaven?” Dad asks. “You can give some drifts a legit try…”

“I’d say yes, but I will have to thankfully decline on the grounds that I choose life,” I say, laughing. 

He chuckles, too. “Okay, life’s a good choice. Musical chairs, off we go!”

I leap out of the car to sprint around to the passenger side as he does the same. Resettling in the passenger seat, I look over at him.

“So where to now?” I ask.

“Well,” he says, “I’m going to take you to get a potentially catastrophic gift. You ready?”

I grin. “Wait — is it a car?”

He gives me a grin right back. “No. But call back next year.”

The drive back to Blüdhaven passes in companionable, easy conversation, the discussions covering all sorts of get-to-know-you topics, and I can’t help but feel my excitement and wonder increasing as I learn just how alike my father and I actually are. Some logistics are chatted over, as well — such as calling Sister Mary and dealing with that side of things (I brought all my stuff with me so there’s not much for her to actually _do_ minus some paperwork at this point), asking what type of school I’d want to go to and if I’d like to continue going to church (a Catholic school, and yes, but once a week instead of three would be nice), can he help me get set up for MMA and competitions locally and otherwise (abso-effing-lutely), do I want to work (yes, please), and am I ready to meet more extended family members and friends soon (yes, yes, yes) and etc. The talk might have been exhausting in other circumstances, but I find it seems nearly impossible to offend or affront Dad in any way, so it goes with surprising ease. By the time we pull into a space in front of an Apple store, the long-term game plan is pretty well set, a little detail that settles my racing, nervous mind.

“Ah, the Apple store,” says Dad, hopping out, “the site at which we will undergo an exceptionally important teenage rite of passage.”

I step out and incline my head as I shut the car door. “How so?”

“We’re getting you a phone and a laptop,” he explains.

I lose my jaw. “Dad, that’s too much —”

“No arguments,” he tells me, throwing an arm around my shoulder and guiding my shocked and discomfited butt to the door. “You’ll need both of them — Babs and I both work, and I’m not comfortable leaving you without some method of contacting us if need be. Equally, you’ll need the laptop for school. There’s not a curriculum on the planet that doesn’t require one anymore. So bottom line, you’re getting both.”

I stutter stupidly for a moment, and then say in a lame voice, “Thank you.”

He smiles down at me. “You’re welcome.”

I have no idea what even to ask for, but Dad at least knows the ropes of phones and computers. Before long, I’m armed with a new iPhone and MacBook. I know the ins and outs of using smartphones, having borrowed my friends’ and Soos’ a time or ten, but I’ve never owned one — the novelty of holding _my iPhone_ in my own hand brings with it an enormous thrill. 

I thankfully have all the relevant phone numbers I would need if this trip to the Haven proved a permanent one (Soos’, Alma’s, Cerdo’s, Sister Nancy’s, my boss at the nursing home I serve dinner at.) I set to plugging them into _ohmigod my new phone!_ on the way to the house that is now to become my home.

Home.

I watch as it comes into view — red brick, flat-fronted, dark shutters. Pines and leafless deciduous trees surround the sides and sprinkle the yard. The porch lights are just coming on in the darkening of the winter late afternoon, glowing softly on the snow. It’s a warm, inviting sight. The cold I could maybe live without, I think, but the idea of cozying up in such a pretty house with the icy temperatures raging outside sounds amazing beyond measure. And the _snow_ — it’s so pretty, so ethereally fascinating that I can’t truly hate it, or the cold that brings it. 

“Ready to meet your stepmom?” Dad asks. “I just got a text from her, she’s absolutely _raring_ to meet you.”

I nod, although I remain uneasy. I wonder why she didn’t come with Dad to pick me up, and if it’s out of not wanting me to be here. I take a breath, thank my father as he gathers up my Mary Poppins bag, and follow him into the house through the garage.

“Oh, Babsy!” Dad calls into the warmth of the house, the house that smells like a mix of coffee and softly scented cleaners. We’ve come into the laundry room, so the aromas of detergent mingle here, too. “Pull out the welcome wagon, we have arrived…”

I follow him into the next room, one dim in the half-light outside. No lamps or lights. The shades on the windows are partially drawn. 

Dad glances back at me, and then the lights abruptly come on. I stare mutely a moment when my eyes fall on a homemade banner that reads, “Welcome Home” and a cake beneath it, along with a handful of small, wrapped parcels. Beside this little spread stands an absolutely _gorgeous_ red-haired woman, her coppery locks thick and glowy under the kitchen lights, her blue eyes vibrant against her adorable smattering of freckles. She’s the woman I saw in the photo in Dad’s office, only even prettier in person. Her stance is supported by arm crutches, the same type a nice kid I was friendly with from school used for his palsy. 

“Is this Lourdes?” she asks, smiling at both of us.

Dad nods, and lays a palm on my back between my shoulderblades. “Indeed it is, my podling and the sharer of my DNA. Babs… meet my daughter. Lourdes… meet my wife, Barbara.”

“Oh, wow, Dickie, she _looks_ like you,” she exclaims. “Except…” She studies Dad, then gives him a sympathetic grimace. “I take it you did the Thing we talked about?” 

“Yeah,” Dad says, and I’m more curious than ever when he says, “We can talk about it later.”

Babs nods, then makes her way to me on her crutches, shifting one to a hand to give me an immediate hug. “Oh, I’m so glad to meet you, Lourdes… Like your dad said, I’m Barbara, but you can call me Babs. Or Barb, if you want. Just… maybe not Barbie, unless you’re _really_ mad at me or something.”

I laugh, and hug her back, all my nerves and misgivings and suspicions going _poof_ in a flash of feeling like a complete jerk. _This_ was why she didn’t come with Dad to pick me up from Gotham — she was here, setting all this up, this massive gesture to make me feel welcome. It’s all I can do not to start blubbering apologies for thoughts she doesn’t even know I had. I wonder why she needs the crutches, but now doesn’t seem like the most opportune time to ask.

“Well, don’t call me Lourdy, and I won’t call you Barbie. Unless we’re mad at each other. Deal?” I ask when I pull back.

“That’s a deal — our code words for when we’re honked at each other,” she says, and I laugh. “Do you have any nicknames you prefer, on that note?”

I shrug. “My friends have a couple nicknames for me — there’s Desi, Lulu, Lu, Lourdita, Dita… I’ll answer to any or all of the above.” 

“I like Lu, personally,” Babs says, then her smile widens as she studies me. “God, Dick — she’s the spitting image of you, I swear… I mean, look how _beautiful_ she is.”

Floored, I jerk my head to look at her. No one has ever called me beautiful before. And in my raggedy hoody and with my unwashed hair, it’s the last thing I ever expected to hear. 

“I know, she really is,” Dad says, giving my shoulder a squeeze.

“Uh… thanks, you guys,” I say awkwardly. 

“So,” Babs says, “I have a room set up for you upstairs for now —”

“Is it the infamous spare room?” I ask.

“The one and only,” she tells me. 

“Barbie!” Dad protests humorously. “Why didn’t you wait for me to help you with that?”

Babs waves a hand with a snort. “Oh, Dickie, please. That’s hardly worth calling me _Barbie_ for. We’ve made it sound like a disaster zone, but it really wasn’t that bad. Now — I don’t know if you’d rather get something set up in the basement, I mean, you’ll have a lot more room down there and thanks to insulation issues it stays a lot cooler in the summer than the upstairs, but sleeping in a weird room is tough already and if you add in the fact it’s an unfinished, creepy, drippy basement…” She shrugs. “Well. I just wanted you to have some options.” 

I chuckle. “Not a huge fan of creepy, drippy basements, so I’ll take the infamous spare room for now.” 

“Oh, perfect. I got all your essentials set up in there — well, minus a full-on bed. But there’s a mattress in there so far, a desk, a dresser, a nightstand… so on. After you open your gifts, we can personalize the room a little more for you.”

I have no idea what to say now, except to fight a sudden desire to cry — the second I’ve been hit with, all in just one day. It’s a _very_ rare occasion that sees me cry. Sometimes, I wonder if I even know how.

 _Be tough, chica,_ Soos has always told me. _Your opponent sees you express any weakness, and they’ll go for it just like a wolf picks off a sick deer. This applies to every other situation, too, by the way — people_ smell _weakness and they hone right in on it. And crying is weakness personified._

An abrupt recollection of leaving San Diego Women’s Correctional when I was little unfolds over me, one of me crying and begging not to have to leave my mom, the tears compounded when my mother herself cried as she was led out of the visiting room. Constanza yanked my arm, tugging me to the car, tsking as she did.

“Now, now,” she said, “none of those tears. Your mother made her bed and she needs to lie in it. Crying won’t change anything.”

Then, as she strapped me into the car on my booster seat, she handed me a tissue and the stuffed bear I favored at the time (and still have, sleeping with Ernie alongside Ollie every night. I’m nothing if not sentimental.) She then patted my hair a little.

“There,” she said. “No more tears, _preciosa.”_

I can’t remember crying since. I haven’t even been able to shed a tear since Mama died. 

And now, for the second time today, here I am — battling a sudden, powerful onslaught of tears. What even _is_ this?

But — I guess at least suppressing them comes naturally. I blink, and smile. 

“Thank you,” I say, the words feeling paltry and inadequate as they leave my mouth. I try again, this time in my other tongue. “ _Gracias.”_

“ _De nada,”_ says Barbara easily. “So… ready to open up and have some cake?” She pulls the lid off the container the cake sits in, then gestures at it with a flourish. “I made it myself…”

“Yes, please,” I say heartily. “Although I think I’m going to turn into a big, ambulatory cake at this rate, given we had a massive one at Jason and Gannon’s place, too.”

She laughs. “Well, you’re only fifteen once. Dig in.”

I do, as do she and Dad. I open the small packages to uncover little printed cards with words and pictures on them. I laugh. They represent bed sheets, wall art, a bed frame, and things like that. As we demolish _this_ cake, we opt to head out to pick things out for my new room after we’ve finished up. 

I watch my father with my stepmother, the warmth they obviously both have for each other in spite of this outlandish set of circumstances we’re now in, how eternally adolescent their interactions are, and how _comfortable_ they are together. I never met my great uncle, but photos suggest Tía Constanza’s marriage was about as warm as a penguin’s butt in the Arctic. Something about the sight comforts me, leading me to believe that even if the majority of me is _past_ overwhelmed, I’m right where I’m supposed to be — and everything’s going to turn out okay.

Once we’re in the midst of a legitimate and _wonderful_ hyperglycemic fit, we all head out to start shopping… as a family unit.

A family. _My_ family.

The wonders _will_ never, ever cease.


	6. Go Fish

  


**CHAPTER 6 — “Go Fish”**

  
  


_Lourdes_

  
  


I gaze up at the ceiling, softly lit by the multicolored, star-shaped string lights that my father helped hang around the curtains at the large, rectangular window across the room, my new phone resting on my stomach. A bookshelf holds my books, new sheets cushion Ollie and Ernie, a dresser holds my clothes. Even if it’s new, I already love my bed — the mattress is soft and warm, resting atop a loft frame that hovers over my computer desk (complete with my new laptop.) The loft’s ladder is wooden and white, girly, but I love it, anyway. The octagonal window is just to my left, giving me a perfect view of the broad, tree-studded backyard from my perch. Paintings and posters adorn my walls, all things _I_ chose, not things hung up on my walls that I’ve been told are there to stay, never to be added to, and to just be dealt with. 

Yesterday we spent shopping for and decorating my room, all of us getting it put together in a sort of co-op effort. All three of us painted after Dad and I shifted and covered the new furniture, rocking out to some tunes and having a bit of an impromptu dance party. Then Barbara took me shopping for school today (jewelry, shoes, accessories… all things to go with the uniform I’ll be wearing at my new school, and I was shocked when she let me pick out some makeup. I can’t wait to try it out.) After observing the rather pathetic amount of clothing and necessities I own, she also allowed me to pick up new MMA gloves, wraps, boxing boots, and workout clothes — and as if that weren’t enough, new books and outfits that she didn’t even police. My aunt had me in school issue polo shirts and khakis when I wasn’t at training, the end. The BB-8 hoodie had been a hand-me-down from a lady at Drake’s and I used to borrow Alma’s clothes when we went anywhere other than each other’s houses. I had no idea how to _begin_ to say thank you to Barbara, although I tried. And by this weekend, Dad’s promised me I’ll have met the rest of my family.

There’s a part of me that’s nervous, but if they’re anything like my uncles and stepmom, I don’t think it will be akin to hot oil or the rack. I take a breath, adrift on the same sense of powerful — but welcome — disorientation that’s characterized the last few days. 

My phone buzzes. It’s Alma, responding to the photo of Dad, Babs and me I sent her that I took earlier. We were at the restaurant and arcade we met my father at when he got off work following our shopping excursion, and after racing through the gravity ropes suspended over the arcade floor like a bunch of crazy people, it seemed like a good time to get a picture. Barbara’s mobility was good today, so she was able to join us on the ropes, I was in new clothes she’d just bought for me, and Dad was bouncy and cheerful — no better photo op, I figured, and handed my iPhone (ahhhh!) to the employee. We all grinned in our harnesses, flushed and clearly happy. Along with the photo booth strip, it’s my favorite picture I’ve ever had taken thus far.

 _Girl, look at y’all!_ I receive. _That’s a happy family in the making right there. Speaking of none of that… your dad’s a TOTAL FOX. D: HOW old is he, exactly??_

I snort, and send, _ALMA. Ew. Go away plz._

_Nope, I’m here to stay. :P But seriously, can I come visit soon? -begs-_

I laugh. _Sure. Just don’t hit on my dad. Goob._

Buzz: _No promises. Tell your (really pretty) stepmom sorry in advance. You know what’s weird, though, chica, I can tell he’s your dad, like you REALLY look like him._

Another buzz follows, not Alma this time. I grin when I see it’s Soos, (finally) responding to my text from yesterday.

 _DITA! You didn’t tell me you were going to see your dad! Q_Q,_ the text reads.

 _Affirmative!_ I send. _That’s what sent me all the way across the country to the Blüd at complete random. XD My mom told me who he was and that he lived here in her last letter._

Buzz: _Why didn’t you tell me that was why you were headed out there!_

I answer, _I didn’t know for sure the guy Mom talked about was actually my dad. I just wanted to see him and find out._

Another text from Soos. _Ahhh, gotcha. So you found the guy from the letter, huh? And you’re like, SURE sure he’s your dad?_

I reply, _Yessir. We had a paternity test done._

_Damn. For serial business then. Does that mean you’re not coming back to Cali :-(_

_Yeah,_ I send, struck with a pang of sadness. _Sorry, Soosy. :-( Alma and Cerdo are BEYOND mad at me, lol._

I pause, considering Soos, the closest thing to a Male Role Model™ I’ve had. The guy’s hardly old enough to be my father (my big brother or young uncle, maybe), but he’s always _felt_ like the next best thing, even for his age and occasionally conceited, forcible, abrasive nature. No matter how puffed up he gets or how much shade he throws, though, you could never ask for a more patient trainer or better corner man. 

(That he’s _very_ cute helps him get away with a lot of that, too. Alma and I might or might not have spent many an illicit sleepover giggling about how we wish we could find someone just like Soos that wasn’t off-limits.)

I sigh. I miss him already. This part of things is going to be _hard._

My phone buzzes. Soos again. _Me too haha._

I smile. _Why you mad, though! You know I’ll come see you when I can. :D I had my first driving lesson today! Next step… ROAD TRIP._

_I’m holding you to that one, Dita :P I can’t figure out WHY you’d wanna hang with a guy you just met a few days ago, but whatever, I guess. Who are you gonna train with now?_

I worm my lip, an odd, sudden flash of defensiveness pulsing through me. _Hey, now. My dad is SUPER nice and so is my stepmom. And come on, Soos — it’s my DAD we’re talking about here._

 _Didn’t say they weren’t nice or that I didn’t get it. Just not happy you won’t be around for a while. :P,_ he sends.

I take a breath, mollified. _As for who I’m training with, I’m not sure yet. My dad’s a bit of an MMA aficionado himself and knows a lot of people I can train with around here. Guess we’ll see. :D_

 _Oh, well good news all around then,_ I receive. _Look, though, don’t be a stranger, OK? Just because I’m not training you full time doesn’t mean I’m not your trainer anymore. <3_

I grin. _You know I’ll keep you posted on how things are going._

 _Good girl,_ comes the next text. _Put me on speed dial._

_Yes, sir. -salute- Look though, Soosy, I’m pretty donion rings. It’s been a really long day and I have my first day at my new school tomorrow, so… this is Ellen Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off._

_Night, Dita. Do your drills and work on getting stronger in the morning before you ship off to high school hell. Don’t let any of those little shit gabachos steal your lunch money. <3_

_I’ll give any moron who tries a good right uppercut,_ I return. _Buenas freakin’ noches._

I send a couple of good night texts to Alma and Cerdo, then just as I’m about to lay my phone aside to curl up and attempt sleep in my new bed, my phone buzzes again.

A text, from Soos.

_Gonna miss ya, Lourdita. Won’t be the same around here without you._

I smile. _I’ll miss you, too. But remember I have you on speed dial. :-)_

Buzz: _Good. Night, chica._

I rest the phone on the small molding of the octagonal windowsill, and sink into the mattress. I wonder if I’ll sleep, given I’m still riding high on the excitement of the last few days, the still somewhat unfamiliar surroundings, and the intense nerves regarding the dreaded First Day of School, but exhausted as I am, I drop off the map in seconds. 

  
  


********

  
  


Standing at the bottom of the steps leading into my new school, I take a breath. Dad offered to let me out a block up in case I didn’t want to be caught getting dropped off by my father on the first day, but I told him I didn’t care. That much was true — shamelessly, I wanted to cleave to him for as long as possible in this alien environment. I consider the length of my skirt, the rise of my knee socks, the little low-rise Mary Jane Dr. Martens Babs got me specifically for school. Somehow, I feel a little self conscious, more put together than I’m accustomed to in my new red pea coat and patterned scarf over my standard issue uniform. I showered after I did my drills and strength training, and gave my normally curly hair a good blow-dry this morning, I went all out after and put on a little bit of the makeup Babs got me. Tia Constanza has to be rolling over in her grave right about now, and if I said I didn’t feel a simultaneous mix of gloating, cackly vindictiveness and serious, panicky guilt rise in my gut about a hundred times a minute, I’d be lying.

Dad, however, tugged at a lock of my newly straightened hair, told me I looked lovely, and to have a “splendid” first day. He assured me that everything would be fine when he clearly picked up on how nervous I was.

“And if it isn’t,” he said, “just remember your dad’s a cop and as such is good pals with the Chief of Police and will happily give anyone who gives you any crap a nice little tour of Lockhaven.”

I laughed. “Thanks, Dad.” 

“Hey, it’s what I’m here for, equal parts embarrassment and protection, right?” he asked, reaching over and nudging my cheek. “Now. Am I picking you up?” 

“Yeah, and I’m not ashamed to accept a ride from my dorky dad just yet,” I said, smiling. “I’ll start walking next week.”

“Roger that,” he said with a chuckle. “Go get ’em, Tiger.”

I laughed, and now here I find myself, about to walk right into the maw of the monster in front of me.

School turns out to be like a dislodged carnival ride, all of the morning a surrealistic blur of new faces, teachers forcing me to introduce myself in front of all my classes, and picking up coursework en medias res. It doesn’t help that _no one_ so much as utters half a syllable to me, even if every last unfriendly classmate seems happy to stare at me so dedicatedly it leaves me wondering if I smeared my lip tint or my mascara is running or something.

I have a horrendous time finding my Honors Biology class, and at last sprint to the office — thankfully in the middle of the main building of the school, which is shaped like a large, double-decker X — to ask the secretary how on God’s green earth I’m supposed to get to room AB 10. There doesn’t even seem to be any corresponding block anywhere in sight.

“Oh, honey — I’m so sorry,” the secretary tells me kindly. “I take it no one gave you a decent orientation tour before you started? Were you introduced to a liaison?”

I shake my head. “I’m sorry, no. There wasn’t time — I only got enrolled yesterday morning.”

“I’m sorry,” the secretary repeats. “Okay — AB 10 is in the building across the back parking lot and up the hill with all the pine trees. Do you know where the bus waiting area is?”

I nod, having passed it about eighty times in the frantic search for my Honors Bio class.

“Okay. Just head there, take the doors out to the lot, and you’ll see the sidewalk up the hill just on the other side. Here, I’ll write you an excuse for being late.”

“Oh, thank you _so_ much,” I tell her, accepting the little note she scribbles for me, and then waving as I hurry to make my way to the external building.

I find the path through the pines without much ceremony, and rush, red-faced and breaking a decent sweat in spite of the fact that I just braved the snow and cold without a coat, into the proscribed classroom. When I enter, the teacher, who’s so tall the brown dome of his snappy haircut is even with the top of the blackboard, turns to face me.

“Who are you, miss?” he barks at me through his thick, nineties sitcom dad beard, lowering his dry erase marker. 

I halt just past the threshold, taken aback by his clear irritation and harsh tone. I push the snowy locks of hair away from my chilled face. None of the teachers have exhibited any overly stern or entitled demeanors so far. This guy, however, just _reeks_ of slab-faced jerk — his entire mien rife with authoritarian douchebaggery and impatience.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m uh, Lourdes Ayala? Er, Grayson. I’m new — I just started today and I couldn’t find the classroom. I have a note here from the secretary —”

“Oh, just go sit,” he snaps. “If you’re late again by so much as a minute it’s a detention.”

I stare a second, uncertain if I’ve just heard him correctly. 

“Did I stutter?” he says. “Sit down — _now.”_

I set my jaw, but nod, knowing darn well better than to state my case to a teacher like _this_ asshat, and start toward the lone, available desk at the front of the room. 

“You’re getting written up for a uniform violation, by the way,” he informs me as I pass him to go sit. When I look bewildered askance, he gestures at my shirt, which has become partially untucked from all the racing around the main building. 

Okay. Enough is enough. I gesture angrily. “I’m sorry, but I had to run around the main building trying to find the classroom —”

“Don’t even start or it’s two write-ups,” he says, and turns his back to continue marking the white board. I jam the corner of my shirt into my skirt, and lower my bag to the floor as I sit. The mix of discomfiture and amusement in the room is palpable as I sit for a moment, collecting myself through the embarrassment and anger. I imagine boring holes in this jerk teacher’s back a moment before I decide I can concentrate on class. I lean down to pull the case of pens from my bag’s front pocket, and inwardly scream when the container’s contents spill with a tremendous clatter all over the floor. A smattering of laughter breaks out in response. My face goes so hot and red I’m shocked it doesn’t go _poof_ into a bloom of smoke atop my neck.

“I’ll warn you, miss, troublemakers don’t last long in my class,” the teacher, Mr. Damon Dowger according to my schedule, drawls at me as I frantically scoop the pens up and back into the bag with the whole classroom of eyes on me. 

A girl to my left leans over to help me pick up my pens. I mouth “Thank you” through my heated, tingling cheeks as I accept the pens from her. She gives me an encouraging smile, her pretty dark eyes sparkling against her beautiful, alabaster skin — so pale it’s almost silvery. I take a breath, and think hard on Alma and Cerdo and what manner of insulting, bawdy verse we’d construct in Mr. Dowger’s honor. 

Once I’ve tolerably come off the humiliation and offense and have settled into listening to Mr. Dowger’s barking voice, I’m dutifully taking notes on his lecture as I follow along in the text. I pause when I feel a light nudge against my ankle. I glance down, and see that there’s a small, folded piece of paper on the floor by my foot. I subtly bend and lift it, making as though I’m adjusting one knee sock, and unfold it under the corner of my text.

On it is a little pen doodle on the paper of Mr. Dowger, the details a perfect facsimile of angry troll faces, his legs fashioned into big goat’s legs with cloven hooves and horns coming out of his forehead. In the background is fire and little imps with pitchforks. The caricatured beard is positively fantastic. Over the picture is written, “ _Demon Blowger.”_

I cover my mouth and chuckle silently, then look over at the girl to my left. She smiles at me, a conspiratorial glint in her eye. I tuck the doodle safely inside my bio text, and return to Mr. Blowger’s lecture as I keep up my notes, feeling now marginally better.

When Bio ends, the girl stands as I do, and waits for me to gather up my stuff.

“So you’re new, huh?” she says kindly as I rise. “Lourdes, right?”

“That’s right,” I say. “You can call me Dita if you want, though.”

“Oh, like Dita von Teese!” she proclaims. “I love it. I’m Toni, by the way.”

“Hi,” I tell her, smiling, feeling a good deal more cheerful as we leave Mr. Blowger’s class. “Thanks for helping me with my pens and for sharing your artisan skills with me.”

She laughs. “You’re welcome. It’s a widely accepted Blüdhaven Catholic fact that Blowger sucks.” I laugh, too.” Anyway — lunch block is next, you want to sit with me and my friends?”

It’s all I can do not to gush as I reply. “Ohmigod — I’d appreciate that _so much_ , thank you. I was afraid I was going to end up hiding in a toilet stall to avoid eating alone with everyone staring at me like I’ve got a bunch of dicks drawn on my face or something.”

“Welcome to Blüdhaven Catholic,” Toni says, and takes my arm as we leave Mr. Blowger’s class to head to the cafeteria. “Xenophobic Clique Capital of New England.”

Toni (Antonia), it turns out, is the daughter of a New Jersey politician who divorced her mother when she was ten, which is why she now lives in the Haven with her mom. Going through the line and then sitting down with her in the cafeteria, I meet her friends, Leo and Eddie. Leo is a bit of a transplant like me, I learn — although he’s from Russia. He’s a positively _massive_ kid, unimaginably tall with beefy shoulders, but he’s just a big marshmallow in spite of that same impressive build, with a warm, soft-spoken disposition. Eddie is a little goofier and more outgoing, his slim form dwarfed by Leo’s, and he gets me laughing within a few minutes of sitting down.

The remainder of the day’s classes pass without much more ceremony, even if the continued onslaught of strangers and learning the layout of the school building is taxing. Most of the material in the courses is manageable, but I’m still coming into brand new curriculum halfway through the year — meaning I’m utterly beat by the time the final bell rings, and I make my way out to the pickup line to meet my dad.

He draws up and lowers the passenger side window.

“How now, the fair Lourdes!” he calls, and I laugh. “Your carriage awaits.”

I wave to Toni as she passes by on her way to walk home, and then fall into the passenger seat. 

“Oh,” says Dad, observing the exchange. “Made a friend already, did you?”

I nod. “A couple, actually. That’s Toni.” 

Dad gives me a warm look when he catches me yawning spectacularly. “So how was your first day?”

“It was definitely a first day,” I say. “Couldn’t find my way to class, check. Jerk teacher, check. Unfriendly classmates, check. But met a couple nice peeps and _didn’t_ have to sit alone like a pariah… also check.”

“Sounds like a pretty standard first day,” Dad says, and squeezes my shoulder. “And a standard first day calls for some Sparky’s milkshakes. What say ye?”

“I say — and resoundingly — oh em gee, yay,” I contribute with enthusiasm. 

“Your wish is my command, my lady,” says Dad, and I lean back to relax a while as he pulls onto the freeway.

However foreign territory school might be, at least Dad hasn’t been tough to adjust to so far. I plug my iPhone into his dash, and settle back to rock out to some tunes with him on the way to Sparky’s.

  
  


******

  
  


_Four Weeks Later_

  
  


I screech as my phone dings across the room. Pops, aka billionaire Bruce Wayne, however, doesn’t let up in the choke he’s working on me with. I vocalize my displeasure when my uncle Tim sits on my phone from where he observes. 

“Nope, no cell phone for you until you either get out of that choke or tap,” he says humorously. “In the meantime, I’m just going to stake my claim here upon its surface — then you get to fight me to reclaim your former territory.”

I laugh in spite of myself and go all in on freeing myself from my adoptive grandfather’s _seriously_ impressive choke. I’m _dying_ to see what text I’ve gotten, but I refuse to tap out to see it and look majorly uncool in front of my adept family members. I’m hoping the text is from Soos.

Since I haven’t been able to see Soos, generally a staple in my life, I’ve been keeping in touch with him, as promised. And once he accepted my capable family are training me now, we’ve been doing a fair bit of friendly chatting — talks quite different from the many we had over the years he worked with me. Prior to my leaving California, I got the impression he saw me as a kid in need of his help, someone he could put his talents to work on. Soos, being a bit of a self-made guy, had pulled himself out of the gutter through his fighting and ability to train and motivate others. I think he saw me as something of a project — potential for him to mold into success. Since I’ve been with my dad, though, his attitude toward me is different, less treating me as a venture, responsibility, someone to do favors for, or to pay a bit of pocket money to run errands — and more treating me as a friend and equal. Getting to know Soos on a new plane like this, truly bonding with him on a personal level after years of knowing him, has been strangely _exciting._

Other than this excitement, I can’t define just what it is that makes me drop everything to read the simplest five word text from him, but _something’s_ driving me to send my homework or books flying or my hapless parents to the curb every time he sends me a message — but that’s been my general reaction to his texts and calls lately.

Today he informed me that he had a bit of a surprise in store for me, and I’ve done everything I could think of to ploy him into giving himself away. No dice so far — but it involved my address, so I’m guessing he’s sending me something. Next step is to confirm that and then milk _what_ it might be out of him.

The pressure on my throat, however, is getting unbearable, and I finally smack the living crap out of Pops’ burly arm. (As for the nickname I gave him, I don’t know, Bruce Wayne just looks like a Pops.) 

“And she taps,” says Pops. “You know, a little more speed in the grip defense might have gotten you out of the rear mount and let you avoid the RNC.”

I take a breath, and flop to my back. “Ugh. If you say so, Gramps.”

“Well. Tim, not only did she tap out, but she’s now resorted to calling me _Gramps,_ as well.”

“Oh, the shame!” Tim proclaims. “But worry not, Gramps, I’m not yielding my position until —”

I dive at him, and he leaps into action with a laugh. Tim’s a nerdy sort, freakishly intelligent and a little quiet and awkward at first. He warmed up quickly upon first meeting, though, and has proven not only easy to get along with, but an invaluable tutor in aikido, an art I’d not tried hitherto. I’ve never seen so many martial arts aficionados in one family — and so much _skill,_ at that. I’d held Soos and his talents in a position close to God, but I think even he would find his hands full if he took on any of my family members. On Barbara’s more mobile days, I don’t think Soos would even _see_ her before she’d laid him out on his can — she’s lightning fast and is an ambidextrous fighter with a nasty right to left cross. And I haven’t even met my adoptive aunt Cass yet — apparently I’m in for it if she opts to work with me. I normally wouldn’t even blink, treating even the toughest opponents as a challenge I could rise to, but I feel a little intimidated when I hear about Cassandra.

“Miss Lourdes, could I trouble you a moment?”

Uncle Tim and I both pause to hear Alfred’s voice. Tim lowers his hands, and I take the opportunity to lightly whack his cheek. 

He laughs. “Well-played.”

Alfred chuckles. “Well-played, indeed. Best keep your hands up at all times with this opportunist. Here, darling, it’s your father.”

“Oh,” I say, accepting the phone he extends to me and holding it to my ear. “Hi, Dad.”

“Hey, Dita,” he says. “Sorry to interrupt your training sesh, but… Speak of the devil and he shall appear — you know your trainer from California that you’ve mentioned to me?”

“Yeah, Soos?”

“I believe so… one Santiago Jesús Navarro, aged 21, amateur MMA fighter and personal trainer, roughly five foot nine and 155 pounds, with an eyebrow piercing?”

“Uh, yep, that’d be him, why?”

“Well, he was just outside our house, looking for you.”

I pause. “What?”

“Yeah.”

“What the hell — sorry, heck — was he doing there?” I ask, then freeze on the spot. 

One point to Soos, color me surprised. Speaking of well-played.

I opt _not_ to tell Dad about the text exchange, instinctively deciding that it might not be in Soos’ best interest.

“Well, Dita, he just kind of showed up outside on the street,” Dad sighs. “Couldn’t help noticing a shifty lowlife wandering around on the sidewalk, looking like he solemnly swore he was up to no good, so I went out to ask if there was something I could help him with. Took a bit of convincing to get him to inform me who he was and what he was doing loitering around the general vicinity of our house.”

I worm my lip. “Oh, come on, Dad, Soos isn’t a shifty lowlife.”

“Hmm. Yeah, we’ll see. Alfred’s already been told to bring you home.”

“Aw, why?” I whine, not wanting to leave.

“Because this is something we need to discuss, Lourdes,” Dad says, an unfamiliar hard, stern note entering his normally warm and cheerful voice. “And not tomorrow, not after dinner — now.”

A flash of defensiveness rises in me, even if I know there’s no way to convince a parent that your trainer making his way across the country for reasons as yet unknown is somehow explicable behavior.

“Okay,” I cave with a sigh. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

I hang up with Dad, then before I do anything else, I go for my cell phone to figure out what the blue hell is up.

  
  
  



	7. RL CreepyPasta

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Omg you guys--I am soooooo sorry for the delay! Things have just been crazy busy and I needed to get some of the plot organized before I committed to how this chapter was going to unfold. I hope you enjoy! Much love and thanks for your patience! :-3
> 
> Xoxoxoxoxoxo,  
> EF!

**CHAPTER 7: RL CreepyPasta**

  
  


_Dick_

  
  


My body flies up into a right angle, my legs pushing me backward in a clumsy thrash. My rasping vocals bust off a shriek and gasp, spraying sweat from my drenched face. I haul in breath after breath, desperate for air that won’t come, clawing with my fingers at —

Bedsheets. Just bedsheets. No sand, clotted with endless splashes of gore. I grasp at my chest, expecting blood, but only clutch the wet, sweaty cotton of my tee. Slowly, I become aware that my breath is coming just fine, filling my lungs and exiting my mouth like normal, that I’m not on Byke Beach exsanguinating and drowning on land, and that Barbara, not Catalina, is speaking to me.

“Dick, babe, it’s okay —” she’s saying, one hand on my arm, the other boosting her up in bed, “it’s just a dream, you’re okay, everything’s okay —”

I fall back with a whoosh of air, and let a hand flop to my forehead. I lie like this for a series of moments, inhaling, exhaling, catching my heaving breath. Barbara runs a hand up and down my arm, continuing to murmur to me as she sits up a little more against the headboard.

“…God,” I finally sigh after a while. “Sorry, Babs.”

She shakes her head. “No, no, honey, it’s okay,” she tells me soothingly, using that tone of voice that can bring me down from even the worst horrors. “Nightmares happen, you don’t need to be sorry.”

I try to nod, waiting for the claws of the dreamscape to loosen their grasping hold. I exhale, long and slow.

“This was a bad one, huh,” she says gently. 

Again, I nod. I sit back up, and lean against my wife for a moment, letting my breathing and heart rate slow.

“It’s been a while since you last had one of these,” she observes after a time. 

“Yeah. I was hoping maybe they’d stopped.” I rub at my face. “Guess my brain had other ideas.”

Barb nods. “Mm. Brains tend to be like that.”

I try to smile up at her, but fail. When I speak, my voice shakes. “Right? Thoughtless turds.”

She gives me a squeeze, acknowledging my efforts. Bless her. “Sure are.” She leans her head on mine where it rests on her shoulder. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I shake my head. “Nah. Same old stuff, different night.” I sit back up, and let go a breath. “Besides, you’ve got work in the morning — I don’t want to keep you up bellyaching about some lame dream.”

“Oh, Dickie, come on,” Babs says, rubbing my sweating back. “You know if you need to talk your way through things, I’m always happy to stay up and listen. In good times and in bad — nightmares totally count in that equation.”

I smile at her, succeeding this time, although my trembling body makes my lips shake. “Thanks, Babsy. But… I’ll be okay. Really.”

She nods, albeit with an infuriatingly skeptical expression on her face, visible in the moonlight that shines through the window, amplified by the snow. Not that I can blame her for being totally dubious — my shaking is rattling the bed, the sheets around me might as well have been doused by a bucket, and my breath, regardless of its slowed pace from before, is barking and uneven. 

“Well,” she tells me kindly. “I’m here if you change your mind.”

I rally a bit, and kiss her cheek. “I appreciate that, babe.” I swing my legs out of bed, and look at her over my shoulder before rising. “Be right back.”

I head into the master bath connected to our bedroom, close the door, and flip on the light, my motions juddering and unsteady. Blinking, I let my eyes adjust as they fall on the outline of my reflection in the mirror. I lean my weight on the heels of my hands against the surface of the basin.

I had thought that nightmare was done. 

For years after the last time I saw Catalina, what felt like every damn night I would have the same dream — I was always lying on the beach, shot to high hell, gagging on mouthfuls of blood and drowning in lungfuls of the stuff. Only in this weird, kaleidoscopic, abstract dreamland, I was in some wall-less version of the old warehouse the Joker tormented Jason in. The Joker was there, cackling wildly as he played back all my worst memories on a projector that overtook the whole of the ceiling of this strange not-building. In front of me, Catalina kept firing her weapon into my prone form, screaming and crying in a nonsense language, her contorted face soaked with inky rivers of black tears, tears that drew her eyesockets and cheeks down until her very face seemed to sag and drip from her jawbones. For all I would try, I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t close my eyes. All the while, the Joker laughed, and Catalina babbled and cried.

It’s been weeks since I last nightmared, months since I had one Catalina-centric, and years since this specific one plagued my slumbering subconscious. I stare into the mirror, reminding myself that what I see is what’s real, that I’m okay and alive, and no longer riddled with bullets or coming off some of the most horrific events I’ve endured in my forty-one years. My face is still mine, a little weatherbeaten given I’m over the hill now, but remaining recognizable as the one I’ve always seen looking out at me from the mirror. Except I’m white as a sheet with blue half-moons shadowing my eyes, the pallid, bloodless skin dappled with sweat. 

I release a sigh, and draw my shirt up, studying the old marks of the gunshot wounds that dapple my chest. They’ve since gone to deep, whitish dips in my skin, their shapes ringed with slightly darker, violetish hues. The giant, canyonous scar from Blockbuster’s machete is still pronounced as ever, the skin there numb to the touch and creating a long, wide divet in my skin. I lower my shirt, press my palms again into the basin, and lower my head. 

My heart still scrabbles madly against my ribs, pounding fit to explode from my chest and add to the marks I have. My muscles are strung, ready to fly or fight, poised precariously on that edge. Every nerve is primed and one tap from bursting into action. 

It’s after four in the morning, I see on the little Alexa that hangs out by the tub. I’m done with patrol and due to rise in less than an hour. I haven’t stopped Nightwing’s patrols, but I _have_ shortened their duration since Lourdes first came to Blüdhaven. At least it was a quiet night this time, one mostly spent sending drunk people home in Ubers and chasing leads on missing persons cases. In other words — there’s no fight to be had just now, nothing to run from, nothing to spur me into action.

I take a breath, and murmur the words Dinah gave me and still encourages me to use when these things happen.

“I’m safe right now,” I tell myself. “Right here, right now, I’m safe. I’m safe in this moment.” 

There’s no point in going back to bed, so I wander back out into the bedroom, and take a moment to chat with Barbara before kissing her to say something like a goodnight as she returns to sleep. Lucky her, she doesn’t need to be up until eight to get ready for her shift at the university library, followed by her afternoon class today. Lourdes is a self-sufficient thing, unfailingly getting herself up, ready for school, and out the door on time to meet her friend Toni to walk to school. She and I cross paths every morning, however, and have made a point of training together and having coffee and breakfast before cleaning up to face our respective days. 

My daughter (ahhh! Nightmares and circumstances aside, that surprise is _never_ going to wear off) won’t be up for close to another hour, however, so I tread quietly past her room to head downstairs. Making my way into the kitchen, I pause to see Lourdes standing at the refrigerator, filling a glass from the water filter. She turns, and smiles to see me.

“Fancy meeting you here, stranger,” she tells me, closing the refrigerator door. “Been a while.”

“Yep, long time no see — a whole seven hours,” I tell her. I drop a kiss on her temple. “You having trouble catching those elusive Z’s, too?”

She groans. “Ugh. I haven’t been able to sleep since like, two. I keep having annoying dreams that wake me up.”

I sit down at the table, and stretch my arms over my head. “I feel that one, girl. No point in going back to sleep at this point.” I sigh. “It’s gonna be a loooong day.”

She sits across from me, blowing a strand of her wavy dark hair away from one eye. “Tell me about it. I have a massive test in Blowger’s class today — dollars to donuts that jerkwad will fail me just because he can.”

“He can try,” I chuckle. “Remind him your grandpa is now one of the school’s finest and most generous patrons — meaning his tenure won’t matter if Bruce Wayne gets mad enough to want him fired.”

She considers. “Hmm. Maybe I should purposely orchestrate some form of teenage malfeasance in his class so he acts like a jerk and gives me some backlash that makes Pop-pop super mad.”

I laugh. “It’s a pretty capital idea, but I don’t know if Pop-pop would condone entrapment. That aside, I don’t think _I_ could as an upstanding officer of the law, either.”

She pouts. “Oh, come on, Dad. Be corrupt just once in your life and fit in with all your peers.”

“Nope. My moral compass points due north in _all_ situations.”

She sticks her tongue out at me. “Boo, you square.”

“Whatever, you love me.” I stand up, facing her, an idea dawning on me. “Well, since neither of us apparently is having any more visits from the Sandman this freezing March morning… What say we get some training done early and grab breakfast from Bernie’s before we head off to the seventh and ninth layers of hell — sorry, work and school?”

Lourdes leaps out of her chair. “Ohmigod — yes, yes, _yes._ They always say to ‘eat a hearty breakfast!’ on the day of a giant test, anyway. Plus — I don’t need to worry about making weight for my fight until April, so.”

I give her a quick hug. “Attagirl. Not that you’ll have trouble with that, anyway — you teenagers with your spotless metabolisms make me physically ill.” She laughs. “Go get ready and I’ll meet you in the basement.”

She grins, and takes off upstairs, a veritable ball of energy even now, prior to five in the morning. I smile, watching her make her way up the steps with her long, black curls fanning out behind her, then stand a moment in the hallway.

All this time, all these years apart, our whole lives never knowing each other and never meeting — and yet somehow, she’s still so much like _me_ that it astonishes me to the point of immobility at times. Something grips my heart in this moment, a fist of emotions in a cluster that threatens to break a lump in my throat and lead to a torrent of waterworks that I can’t fully explain. 

Four weeks since Lourdes arrived in my life, an unexpected package delivered to my doorstep on Valentine’s Day like some sort of universal gift and pittance for the circumstances that brought her into the world — and I’ll tell you here and now that that girl has my heart hook, line, and sinker. There’s nothing on any world or in any dimension that I wouldn’t and won’t do for her. It’s utterly disorienting, how I can love someone so powerfully while I’m technically still getting to know her.

I take a breath, wipe the damp from my cheeks (I am _such_ a sap), and head to my own room to dress for our habitual training together.

  
  


*******

  
  


“What the literal heck?”

I turn to Gannon, chuckling at his verbiage.

“You know, your fifteen-year-old niece isn’t around at the moment, so I’m _pretty_ sure you can get away with saying a teensy four-letter word like…” I lower my voice to a whisper as I lean toward my partner, “ _hell.”_

He grins his dimpled grin at me. “Yeah, but if I make a habit of dropping H bombs of the non-human life ending variety away from Dita, I’m going to wind up slipping up around her and officially render myself a bad example to our resident impressionable youth.”

“This you or your mother talking?” I ask.

“You shut your bitch mouth,” Gannon says. 

I laugh out loud. “Okay, crossed a line, moving on past your knuckle-racking mother. So what was the ‘what the literal heck-slash-hell’ for, exactly?”

“Oh, just — I never expected to see a name like _Tiger Shark_ coming up as a person of interest in a case the Blüdhaven Police Department is working. I mean… when’s the last time the US dealt directly with freakin’ _pirates?”_

“Well, we are in a coastal city, dude,” I remind him. “At some point, we were bound to see at least a _couple_ of real-life pirates.”

“In person and not on TV — I think my inner child just peed himself with joy,” Gannon says. “What would my five-year-old self have said if I could go back in time and tell him he’d get to play with _real pirates!_ Man, for once I think I chose the right career, chasing some scurvy pirate dogs out of our local coastlines… I’m going to have to study up on my lingo.”

“Avast, ye landlubber, it be a fistful o’ scurvy buccaneers be investigatin’ these bilge rats with the blessin’ o’ the queen,” I bust off in pirate speak. “Can’t have these knaves be infiltratin’ the friendly waters above Davey Jones’ locker, arrrrr.”

“Ah-harrr, friendly waters that still belong, last I checked, to Black Mask,” Gannon says, then sighs. “Man — if it’s not Blockbuster, it’s Carmine Falcone, if it’s not Carmine Falcone, it’s Black Mask, if it’s not Black Mask… it’s some wannabe Jack Sparrow in a Rey Mysterio mask.”

“Lies detected, none. I’ll just point out his supervillain name is probably one he cooked up as a kid fantasizing about his WWE career.” I consider the case files spread out across the table between us, ones dumped here with a slam not ten minutes ago on Amy’s way by. “What it looks like is that the Haven is becoming something of a port of transfer or drop-off for Tiger Shark these days… Maybe he’s got some new business partners in the form of Black Mask or the Falcone family. Speaking of. Penguin up in Gotham’s also a possibility.”

“Could be. Would make sense. It’s not like mobsters only deal in drugs and such. Blockbuster had a thing for highly sketchy illicit weaponry, if memory serves.”

I nod, the slightest twinge in my abdominals now the only banal response to Blockbuster’s name. Once, I couldn’t even hear those syllables without clamming up, sweating, and needing to excuse myself to replevy my senses. I’ll take this improvement in the form of only my digestive system protesting the sound of Blockbuster’s name. “Right, and you get an accomplished self-proclaimed pirate who’s set up a pretty tidy enterprise across international waters, you’re going to come into some decent goods.”

“So how much does the other guy know about Tiger Shark?” Gannon asks — code for “What have I learned as Nightwing?”

“He knows a pretty fair deal,” I assure him. “Essentially TS has a stake in international waters acquiring and running goods from valuable historical items to extraterrestrial technology and beyond, with comfortably established territory in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, as well as areas in the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas. And I’d love to say he’s an ill-educated, sea-faring dope who just happens to have a mean streak long enough to keep him afloat while dealing with such villainous characters as Black Mask and Deathstroke, but he’s a sharp one, and kind of a beast, to boot. Can’t say neither I nor the other guy is too thrilled to learn he’s possibly expanding his ports to the Blüd.” 

Gannon buzzes his lips. “I’ll second that one. So what’s our plan?”

“Well, we’ll probably have to notify the Coast Guard at some point, depending… and I’ll have to tap into some other sources through the other guy, too, to maybe start gathering some intel.” I stretch my arms over my head. “Been a while since Tiger Shark’s been seen on the East Coast — last time he was traipsing around these waters, he was chilling a little inland in Savannah, Georgia. More recently he’s stuck to Southern California when he’s doing runs to the States.”

“Ah. Must be expanding his business partnerships, like you said.”

I nod. “That’d be my guess. Let’s get gumshoeing and start connecting the dots — _after_ some coffee.” I yawn spectacularly. “Lourdes and I were up at the buttcrack training this morning and frankly, dude, training with that little ambulatory Bang energy drink before the sun’s even up reminds me I’m fucking old.” 

Gan laughs. “Dude, we’re the same age — you say ‘old’ one more time and I’m feeding you to my mom.”

“Threaten your mom on me again and I’ll feed you to Jason,” I return.

“…That’s different from my normal nights _how,_ exactly?”

I snort. “Fair point. Let’s caffeinate and get to it, Watson.”

  
  


*******

  
  


A flurry of movement through the front window attracts my eye from my laptop, and I peer through the smoked crystals of frost that cling to the panes. I frown, looking harder, and rise a bit from the chair at the desk in the front room.

“You okay, hon?” Barb asks, turning from where she stands at the stove in the kitchen. She peers curiously at me through the entryway to the front room. The scent of butter and onions cooking wafts my way, not as appealing as it was a moment ago.

“Yeah — but don’t look now, I think there’s a shifty lowlife walking around our front yard,” I inform her, moving to the window to get a better look. 

She freezes in what she’s doing. “What?”

I hold up a finger, and squint into the darkness outside.

Sure enough, there’s definitely someone on the sidewalk that lines our front yard, standing and gazing at our house. This person is apparently male, dressed in jeans, a coat, and a gray sweatshirt with the hood pulled up. Camped on the street beyond is an old, chewed up Honda Civic, parked just out of the illumination of the nearby street lamp. Footprints in the snow suggest that this same person, the fact he’s built like a brick shithouse evident even beneath his clothing, has been wandering about the street and sidewalk in front of our house a fair bit. I clench my jaw.

“Babs, I’ll be right back,” I tell her. 

“Dick —”

Ignoring her, I grab my badge and nightstick from their perch on the hutch by the front door, and make my way into the cold of the evening. I push the nightstick into the elastic of my track pants and let my hoodie cover the majority of it, but keep my badge in hand.

“Hey, buddy — you want to take a picture of the house or something so you can more effectively commit it to memory?” I say, not unpleasantly, walking casually across the yard to approach this stranger.

The guy turns his gaze from the house to me, and gives me a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Sorry, I’m looking for someone. Am I doing something wrong?”

“Not necessarily. Just I’m a cop, and a guy apparently casing my house gives me pause,” I say. “You said you’re looking for someone?”

He nods. “That’s right.”

“Well, who’re you looking for? Maybe I can help you find them.”

The guy shakes his head. “Nah. I think I have the wrong address. I’ll try the next street up.”

Something’s majorly pinging my radar — big time. I can’t place what in specific it might be, but the alerts continue to go off, ones beyond those set off by some creeper loitering outside my home.

To keep the upper hand, I retain my pleasant affect. 

“Well, going by the footprints all up and down the street, I’m guessing you’ve been looking for a while,” I observe with a chuckle. “You know, I’ve lived in this neighborhood for a pretty long time — I probably know who you’re looking for.”

Whatever warmth might have been in the kid’s expression fades abruptly, leaving a stony mask in its wake. 

“Don’t worry about it,” he tells me firmly, making it clear he doesn’t want to interact. “I’ll just check the next street up.”

I maintain my helpful disposition. “Well, I mean, if you need my help…”

“You said you’re a cop?” the guy asks. 

“That’s right,” I tell him, and show him my badge.

“Pretty sure the fuzz isn’t normally this helpful,” he says coldly. 

I give him one of my “Instagram famous” smiles. “You got me there. To be honest, I can’t say there’s a _total_ lack of suspicious activity going on here, so… what do you say you just tell me who you are, who you’re looking for, and why, and then we can part ways as unlikely pals?”

“Sorry, but I don’t see that one happening,” the guy says. “I’m just going to leave now.”

He turns to walk toward the car parked across the street. 

“Very well, sir,” I call after him, “but can you provide me your license and registration first? Considering you’re parked in a clearly marked no-parking zone _and_ you’re sniffing around my yard all suspicious-like?”

The kid goes tense at that, but with a slight huff, produces the appropriate documentation after opening the driver side door.

I check it, and feel my guts sink.

It’s a California license, the name on it reading Santiago Jesús Navarro, aged 21. I frown, remembering all the times Lourdes has brought up Soos — her old trainer — to me. I study the middle name, and it doesn’t take much more than a Planck length to enjoy a visit from Mr. Obvious. I look up at Santiago, doubtless “Soos,” and hold his icy, defiant gaze. 

He’s a nice-looking kid, with dark curls poking out from beneath his hood, his brown eyes big and guileless under the left eyebrow piercing. His skin is completely flawless, lending a babyish quality to his features. A close, neatly maintained growth of facial hair lends a few years to his otherwise youthful face. 

In spite of this, however, something about him seems wolfish and feral — there’s an incendiary current that hums under the surface, radiating a sense of grave peril about this young man. Were I anyone else, I’d think very strongly that I wouldn’t want to fight him — and that I’d do well to do whatever I had to in order to stay off this guy’s bad side. 

Unfortunately for Mr. Navarro, however, I’m _not_ anyone else, and I maintain my own stony (yet stalwartly friendly) look. 

“Hailing from Cali, huh?” I ask, handing the card back to him. 

His expression doesn’t change. “Obviously.”

“Just as an aside, it’d behoove you _not_ to get smart with me,” I tell him in a kind tone. “Any chance you’re looking for Lourdes Ayala?”

He shrugs. “Maybe. What’s it to you?”

“Well, considering she’s my daughter, quite a bit.”

I see Santiago’s jaw clench in the streetlight. 

“Tell you what, Santiago —”

“Soos.”

“That’s right. Soos. She’s mentioned you. How about you give me a message and I’ll make sure she gets it?” I say.

“Yeah, forget it,” he says, sliding into the driver’s seat of his car. “I’ll just talk to her myself.”

“You can try,” I inform him, extending a hand to stop him closing his door. “But I highly doubt you’ll be talking to her without me present any time in the near future. Or far future.”

There’s a pause, as he holds my gaze a moment.

“So… you’ve been her dad for like, ten minutes and now you own her?” Soos asks me in time with a false not-smile. 

I smile right back. “Why don’t we all discuss that together in about an hour and a half or so? Lourdes is with her grandfathers and uncle at the moment in Gotham, but we can have her come home early.”

“What for?”

“I mean… here’s the thing, _Soos_ — maybe if you’d have acknowledged and _talked_ to us instead of skulking around our front yard like some kind of reprobate, you’d learn that coming to the door and politely asking my wife and me to see Lourdes like a normal, well-intentioned person would have resulted in my being a little more amenable to that happening.”

“Well, I’m just failing to understand why I, as an adult, have to have permission to talk to my own athlete,” he tells me.

A spear of heat goes through me at this. It’s all I can do not to grab this entitled punk by his perfect jawline and choke him until he agrees to bounce back to California and never stick a toenail in New Jersey ever again.

“Your own athlete? First of all, she’s not —” I make the quote motions, “‘your athlete’ anymore — Dinah Lance and Ted Grant are the trainers she’ll be representing here in Jersey, meaning you’re not even _on_ her list of credentials at this point in her MMA career,” I state. “Along with several members of her immediate and extended family, myself included. And nor was she ever _your athlete_ — who’s acting like they own her, now, exactly? So if you want me to _not_ lock Lourdes away in some dragon-guarded castle in an effort to protect her from some shifty lowlife creeping on our property like the Croglin Grange vampire, how about you pretend you’re a well-mannered young man with nothing but pure, noble thoughts regarding my daughter and come inside to have some coffee with me and the Mrs. until Dita gets home?”

Again, he clenches his jaw. “If you’re this bent on having a conversation about this, I’ll just wait in the car until she gets here.”

“Fine by me,” I tell him. “Kindly don’t try cutting and running, though, okay? I don’t want to have to be the one to tell Lourdes why her former trainer is suddenly blacklisted from her life.”

He glares, and shuts the door. He starts the engine, but doesn’t make any motions to drive. 

Buzzing now with repressed fury and a powerful sense of guardianship that borders on panic and anxiety, I hurry back into the house, and slam the door shut. 

“Babe?” Babs calls from the kitchen.

“One minute,” I tell her. “We have something of an incident forming — I’ll fill you in in a sec.”

I swipe my cell from the desk in the front room, and dial Lourdes. When she doesn’t pick up, I call Alfred, drumming my fingers madly on the wooden surface of the desk. 

It’s all I can do to inhale and exhale myself into something of a calmer frame of mind, not wanting to upset my daughter over my unfavorable first meeting with a person that I know means a great deal to her and has been a hugely important part of her life for a good amount of years. I can’t say what’s motivating this guy’s secretive — and downright sketchy — behavior, but I just hope it has more to do with a justified dislike and mistrust of police officers, and _not_ some kind of potential malintent or flat-out disrespect that would make him want to avoid me as Lourdes’ father. 

I take a breath, thinking that the next hours are really going to suck for everyone involved in this rapidly forming mess.

  
  


*******

  
  


By the time we’re all seated in the front room — Lourdes, Barbara, Soos, and myself — I’ve dialed back the rage mode with tolerable success, although there _was_ a moment of tension so palpable you could punch it when Lourdes attempted to joyfully hug Soos upon her arrival back at the house. I brazenly interceded, not using words, but making it clear that wasn’t to happen while I happened to be around. She’d given me a bewildered look, but had obeyed, and complacently sat down on the chintz armchair by the window. I motioned at Soos to sit in the wooden rocker farthest away from Lourdes (and the most uncomfortable seat in the house.) Babs and I had our seats on the couch facing the kids.

And here we are… off to see the wizard.

“So,” I begin kindly. “How about some _proper_ introductions this time?” 

“Sorry, Dad,” Lourdes says with a sigh. “This is Soos — my trainer from California.”

“Real quick, Dita —” I interrupt, “ _you_ don’t have anything to apologize for, here. Considering that you were genuinely surprised to hear that Soos was in New Jersey, I’m guessing you didn’t have a hand in orchestrating his impromptu visit.”

She mutely shakes her head. 

I frown. My daughter seems tense, hyper-focused on Soos, almost as though on a hair-trigger wired to whatever he might do. Her sudden comparative quiet — one that surpasses an awkward meeting between her trainer and her father — is uncharacteristic and reads of something amiss somewhere. It’s no secret that she likely has something of a crush on him, given her flushed cheeks and sparkly eyes and vibrating aura now he’s in the room, but that doesn’t account for the fact that it’s almost like she’s _waiting_ for Soos to speak or take action — and whatever he does, she’ll respond in turn. 

I could be off base, but I’ve been a cop for twenty years now, and a vigilante since I was nine. My instincts have had a lot of time and experience to hone themselves, not once leading me astray. And since Catalina, I’ve learned to _hearken_ to them. I glance over at Barbara, and find that she’s giving the same tells — although her face is impassive and her body language forcibly open, there’s a flinty glow in those blue eyes of hers. 

Given Soos’ sudden, unannounced arrival, our inauspicious introduction, and my daughter’s now almost _servile_ demeanor, my inner Papa Wolf rises to the occasion, bristling and hunching. 

This isn’t going to be a fun night, if things go how I have a feeling they’re going to go. For Lourdes’ sake, I hope I’m wrong — but I don’t think I am. 

Here we go… 

“He’s right, Lourdes,” Babs says, referring to my earlier comment. “You don’t need to apologize for anything, and you don’t need to take responsibility for Soos. You didn’t cause the situation, here.”

“What situation?” Soos queries. 

“This one,” Barb tells him, gesturing at the room.

“How is it a situation, other than that you’re _making_ it one?” Soos asks.

I grit my teeth. My father and Bruce alike would have blasted this kid into the next dimension. I take a breath, and let it go. 

“Well, you _did_ just kind of show up here, looking for an underage girl, and you were apparently spectacularly unbothered by the concept of introducing yourself to her parents,” I explain. “So I would say yes, this is, in fact, a situation, you _caused_ this situation, and you probably owe us an apology.”

“For what?” Soos asks, nothing about his body language changing. In fact, he looks prepared to throw down at any given moment. 

“Well, for one, you scared the living crap out of me, skulking outside like a scarecrow,” I say, “and for another, you _still_ haven’t explained yourself. I mean — you can’t deny that it’s more than a little weird, some grown-ass man randomly showing up here from the other side of the country looking for a fifteen-year-old girl.”

“Dad —” Lourdes interjects, leaning toward me and gesturing. “We never used to involve Aunt Constanza in anything we did other than training because she wouldn’t have let me have anything to do with him outside of the gym. It’s just — it’s _new_ to Soos to have to involve another adult in seeing me, that’s all.”

I stuff my impatience (and anger at this new revelation), forcing calm. “Lourdes, you shouldn’t have had any interactions outside of training, period — but that’s something we can discuss in a minute. As of right now, no one has told me _why he’s here._ And if he’s here just to see you for whatever reason, you _both_ need to understand that that’s _beyond_ inappropriate.”

“Why’s it inappropriate?” Soos asks. “Lourdes isn’t exactly a child, I’m pretty sure she can make _some_ decisions on her own, including who she decides to spend her time with. And I’ve been her trainer since she was eleven years old — it's not like we don’t know each other, and if I want to check up on her training and look into who she’s fighting in April, I ought to be able to do that without jumping through a bunch of hoops, asking permission from her father and stepmother first.”

“Okay — Soos, you’re twenty-one years old. Lourdes turned fifteen last month. There is _nothing_ about that statement that is even remotely appropriate,” Barbara interjects. 

“And like I told you outside, you’re _not_ her trainer now — and that being said, you could have just called her current trainers to get all the information you needed,” I add. “You didn’t need to show up in our front yard _stalking_ her.”

“Dad!” Lourdes protests.

“Last I checked, I have the right to travel where I choose,” Soos says, “and I happen to have some sales business with the Drake’s Gym location here. I wanted to check in on Lourdes while I was in Jersey — I didn’t realize I had to sign a permission slip with her dad of ten minutes to do that.”

“Soos!” Lourdes, again, protests. 

“See — helpful information you could have given me an hour ago,” I tell Soos, opting to ignore his digs at me. “And I’ll just repeat myself — what I’m still not understanding is why you refuse to communicate with Barbara and me and seem to want to treat talking to Lourdes like it’s some kind of covert op. What are your intentions with her, exactly, that you have to keep them on the DL like this?”

“Are my intentions your business?”

Heat flies into my face, and my forced calm finally lapses. I stand. “Of _course_ they’re my business — I’m her father!”

Lourdes sits up in her chair, raising her hands in an apparent panic. “Dad, come on, this isn’t helping anything —”

Soos cuts Lourdes off, standing to face me head-on. “Yeah, you’re her _father._ You’ve been in her life for all of what, a month? I’ve been there for _four years._ You don’t get to be absent for her entire life and then all of a sudden show up and start dictating her every move like she’s five years old. Unlike you, I’ve actually _been_ there for her — fuck, I’ve been more available to her in the last five minutes than you have over the course of her entire life, Superdad. So I don’t think you have any right to tell me what role I’m going to play in her life — I think _Lourdes_ ought to decide that.”

It’s all I can do not to throttle the living hell out of this little shit here and now. Barb rests a hand on my arm — although I don’t miss the heat and tremor in her palm. She’s hopped up, too. She gives me a light pull, encouraging me to sit beside her.

“You can sit down, Santiago — and that’s enough of those comments about Lourdes’ father only being there for x amount of time,” Barbara says, unable to fully restrain the acid in her voice. “First off, you don’t come into _our house_ and start hurling insults. Second, Richard can’t be held responsible for something he didn’t even know about. And third — and final — you can go about whatever sales business you have here in Blüdhaven, but if you want to see Lourdes without backlash, you’ll do it with our permission and under our supervision. Whatever you might think, Lourdes _is_ still a minor and gallivanting around with a fully grown man in any non-professional circumstance is completely unacceptable.”

“I don’t think you give Lourdes enough credit,” Soos says. “She’s a lot more mature than what you seem to think or want to treat her as.” 

“Neither of us is saying she isn’t mature,” I state, making a colossal effort to transfigure _some_ form of civility from the depths of my soul. “But what we _are_ saying is that she’s underage, and you’re an adult. A relationship between the two of you that’s anything other than a professional one is _completely_ off the reservation. If you showed up wanting to check in on her trainers and opponent while you’re in the area because you care about her success, okay, fine — but you should have run that by Barbara and me first, or at least _included_ us in that. Am I clear?”

“See, the fact you’re talking about her like this proves my point,” Soos tells me. “You sit there saying you know she’s mature and whatever, but you don’t _know_ Lourdes at all. I mean, that girl’s been in charge of herself her whole life. Just because you opted to play house with her because you’re obligated now doesn’t mean you suddenly have the right to start telling her what to do and what not to do. I get you want to pretend you’re Dad and everything, and I respect that, but that you happen to be her father doesn’t change who Lourdes is or how she decides to live.”

I sit for a moment, letting those words fall on the heavy, rubber-thick tension in the air. My heart isn’t even what could be called legally _beating_ in my chest at this point — it’s vibrating in a thrum against my ribs. My jaw is clenched so tight I’ll doubtless end up with a killer tension headache later. My biceps strain against the sleeves of my shirt. If Lourdes wasn’t in the room, I’d _flatten_ this little asshole here and now — and enjoy doing it.

Lourdes sits in her chair, her arms around herself, one leg swinging wildly, her gaze dedicatedly focused on the throw rug. Periodically, she picks at her lips. Barbara’s jaw is set as she stares at Soos, the glint in her eyes making it clear that this conversation is officially over.

Okay. Time for the paternal smackdown. We tried. We didn’t succeed. Lourdes is going to hate me for a few weeks, but she won’t be the first teenage girl salty about being kept from having an entirely inappropriate relationship with a toxic and manipulative male.

“Clearly,” I tell Soos, “there isn’t any talking to you, Mr. Navarro. I’ll thank you to get out of our house now. If I see you on our property, I’ll be calling my brothers at the BPD to take care of the situation in whatever way they deem appropriate. If I find you’ve had any contact with Lourdes from here on, I’ll pursue legal action, including protective orders and other charges that will land you in the cooler for a good, long time —”

“Dad!”

I ignore Lourdes. “Capisce?”

Soos stands, and stares me down a moment, squaring his shoulders. I hold his gaze in silence.

“Fine,” he tells me. “If this is how you want it, this is how we’ll play it. But I’ll tell you here and now — Lourdes is her own person, and if she wants to do something, she’ll find a way. And you don’t have any right to stop her.”

I stay quiet, watching as he walks out of the room, and finally through the front door. Babs stands, walking to the window to gaze through the panes, ensuring that Soos leaves.

“Well, I think it’s safe to say we’d prefer you not have any contact with that guy,” I sigh, looking over at Lourdes. “Sorry that it had to come to this, but… can you understand that?”

Lourdes finally reanimates, and leaps to her feet. “Dad, _please_ — you don’t think that all this is a _little_ extreme? You couldn’t at least _try_ to listen to anything he might have had to say? God, you made him out to be some kind of criminal from the get-go and didn’t even give him a chance to explain himself — no wonder he got his guard up and mouthed off! Not to mention, the cops in LA are total bastards to him — that you’re a cop only made him _more_ likely not to trust you or want anything to do with you!”

I take a breath, and decide in the interest of choosing my battles, not to get on her about swearing. “Dita — I understand why you’re upset, and I also acknowledge the validity behind your points. But if you were in my position, you would see this whole thing differently. You need to understand that he _acted_ like a criminal from the get-go, and I tried to be civil with him and netted zero results — I didn’t treat him like anything he wasn’t acting like first. And I _get_ that things were different back in California, but you’re not _in_ California anymore — and you have parents now that care about you and want you to be _safe_. We’re not trying to tell you what to do or what not to do — we’re trying to protect you and teach you to lay boundaries with people. And frankly, that man has done nothing but make it clear to me that he has no concept of boundaries — and that he’s lacking that basic principle with a minor? It’s a _little_ concerning. So I’ll say this now — I don’t want you to have any contact with him, at least for as long as he refuses to come around. Not because I’m trying to dictate your life, but because I can tell you here and now he’s _not_ in any way a force for good for you.”

Lourdes’ eyes spark. “How would _you_ know? You know, he was right about one thing — you _don’t_ know me, and like it or not, you definitely don’t know me nearly as well as _he_ does. Maybe you should think about that before you start throwing your weight around with him like he’s some kind of deviant — which he _isn’t.”_

Before I can reply, she’s up the stairs like a shot, her footfalls echoing through the house. The sound of her door slamming shakes the foundations. 

I let go a long sigh, and press my face into my palms. Babs echoes the sound. 

“Well, that went well,” I say.

Babs laughs a bit, releasing some of the mushrooming tension. 

“You know,” she tells me humorously, still standing by the window with her arms crossed over her chest, “I’m _so_ glad you were my one true love. At least my father never had to worry.”

“You picked up on that, too, huh?”

“It’s all over her, Dickie,” she says with a sigh. “I don’t _want_ to try reading whether it’s all over him, but… she’s at least got it _bad.”_

I groan. “Great.”

“If it helps,” she says, “I think most girls at one time or another in their formative years have had a thing for the Bad Boy. Thankfully she's in the process of building a very good support system now, so maybe she’ll learn from this one _before_ she faceplants over it.”

I lower my hands, keeping them at my chin. “…I don’t know, Barb. I feel like you’re giving me too much credit, here. I mean — do you think maybe I handled that wrong? Maybe Dita was right — maybe I wasn’t being fair with how I treated him. I mean… I probably could have achieved our desired end by a different means, and then everyone would’ve been happy.” I pause. “Well. Happier, anyway. I’d still rather that kid not be found within twelve parsecs of our house and daughter.”

She shakes her head. “Amen to that. But no, honey. I don’t think you handled that wrong, and I don’t think I’m giving you too much credit. _Everything_ about that kid screams that something’s just completely and utterly off.” She inhales, sitting down beside me. “The fact that he’s twenty-one and she’s fifteen and there’s clearly a whole lot of _something_ between them aside.” She mock-shudders. “I can’t place it, but I _don’t_ think Mr. Navarro is doing volunteer work and taking care of the less fortunate in his free time.”

I shake my head, thinking a moment. “…I guess Lourdes really did take after me, didn’t she.”

Barb inclines her head. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I just kind of get the feeling from Soos that he might just need something of a loving hand to steer him to the light, if that makes sense,” I tell her. “I know better than to pay more heed to that than all the red flags my gut’s sending up these days, but…What if that’s what’s motivating Dita to give him the benefit of the doubt?” 

Babs gives me a gentle half-smile. “Then it just means she inherited your big heart, Dick. That’s not a flaw. You’ll just have to work a little harder to protect her and teach her to protect herself sometimes.”

I heave a sigh. “You think I should go talk to her?”

“Nah,” Babs says. “Let her have a minute — or a day — to cool down. All you need to do is let her know you’re still here for her and everything between the two of you is fine, outside of Soos.”

Again, I sigh. “Okay. I guess I can do that.”

“I’ll have our interrupted dinner finished here in about half an hour, so you can test the waters a little bit then,” Babs says, kissing my temple and standing up. She squeezes my shoulder. “I know we’re new to this parenting thing, and this situation that just came walking through our door is a pretty giant test of our merit in the endeavor. But… for what it’s worth, I think you made the right choices in this situation and you couldn’t have handled it better if you were dancing with a teacup on your head.”

I grasp her fingers a moment. “Thanks, Barb.”

She gives me her beautiful smile. “Anytime, babe.”

As she makes her way into the kitchen to pick back up where she left off, I spend a long time seated on the sofa, watching the snow come down outside. 

For as much as I know it will be worth it in the end, this is going to be so, so _hard_ in ways I never anticipated.


	8. Does Whatever a Spider Can

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! 
> 
> Quick shout-out to aj_mcleod, the most awesome beta (and person) in all the land! Couldn't have done this without you! You the beeest~ <3 ^_^
> 
> Couple little Spanish translations at the end. <3 
> 
> Some squicks and creepy stuff, but this is the darkest it gets, so don't fear. <3 Regarding Soos, a rumble is a'brewin... 
> 
> Enjoy, all. Much love!
> 
> ~EF <3

**CHAPTER 8: Does Whatever a Spider Can**

  
  


_Lourdes_

  
  


I sit on my bed, torn between fuming, screaming, and feeling secondhand embarrassment for Soos’ sake. My sweaty hand clutches my phone. Unable to think of anything else to do in the moment, I texted Alma and Cerdo in a group text a minute or so ago, trying to figure out what the heck I’m supposed to do from here. I thought about texting Toni, but there’s an odd mental block inside my brain against my sharing anything about Soos or my old life with her. She’s been an amazing friend over these last weeks, enabling me to settle into my new digs in Jersey outside of my house with unexpected ease, but I’m somehow afraid of introducing anything of a new dynamic into our friendship. I sit and pick at my upper lip.

 _Wait, lemme get this straight… Soos is frickin there???_ I get from Alma.

I thumb in a reply. _Yeah… he showed up because I guess he has sales business at the Drake’s here and came around to check in on me… but got my dad THE COP instead >.<_

 _Bet sparks flew… as we all know Soos LOOOOOVES cops,_ Cerdo responds. 

_Yep,_ I text them. _It was love at first sight, fireworks and lightning strikes and hearts and flowers -sigh-_

I pause after I send this, and heave a real sigh. The truth is that I’ve always known Soos hates cops (and any form of authority or “power,” really, including say, the Justice League or Young Justice groups.) But I’ve never seen him act that way before — so cold and disrespectful and hard. It made me uncomfortable in a way I can’t explain, seeing him talk to my father like that, witnessing a side of him that I had sensed for some time, but never actually seen. And while a part of me appreciates the sense that Soos was taking up for me in some way, another was a tad squicked by the way he treated my dad in the process (and honestly failed to even let me speak for myself — I’m young, okay, but I’m not _that_ young.) 

Equally, I didn’t like that Dad had so much trouble accepting what my relationship with Soos is like. Granted, I should probably have shared with him more details of it, but something in my gut hollered that Dad wouldn’t have approved, so I just stayed mum about some of the grittier details. But the truth is that it wasn’t unusual for me to hang out at Soos’ place in Cali for a little while when I’d pick up the letters he’d have me drop off to people for him, playing _MarioKart_ or watching fights and Netflix or doing extra mitts or whatever. We talked a lot during those times, and to say I know Soos very well and that he knows me just as well would be an understatement. 

My aunt was never aware of this added facet of our relationship — it only transpired when she was asleep, knocked out by Ambien at nine on the knob until five the following morning. I would sometimes on weekends make my way out of my window and walk to Alma’s or Cerdo’s, or have Soos come pick me up to drop me off at either of their places or the arcade. Any errands Soos needed me to do for him (usually dropping the aforementioned sealed letters off at clients’ addresses or gathering payment from them for him or other easy stuff like that, all in return for free mitts sessions) I’d get done after I spent some time with my friends, and generally that’s when our own hang-outs would go down. 

We joked that it was probably weird we were so close, given that anyone on the outside would consider our bond a major scandal since our age differential is pretty significant. But he said it was no different than his little sister hanging out at his place, that people wouldn’t understand, anyway, and so not to pay them any mind. And here we are — not unlike best buds, as well as mentor and student.

Then Dad hauled off and expressed a level of protectiveness that, granted, I’ve always craved from a paternal figure — but I wish it was directed at someone other than Soos. How can I make my dad understand, or see what I see?

I had pictured their first meeting _so many_ times — I couldn’t help but RL ship them as pals, bonding over their shared love of martial arts and video games — but reality delivered a grossly different image. Now there’s this harsh, panicky feeling in my middle that threatens to make its way into my chest, one that’s entirely new and I can say I _really_ don’t like. I want Soos to like my dad — and I want my dad to like Soos. I wish either of them could see in the other what I see in both. However, their actual first meeting isn’t exactly inspiring to that end.

So now what? Do I eat dirt with my dad, tell him I’ve never seen Soos act like that, agree that yes, I can understand how it would be construed as weird that he was creeping around the house looking for me — _however_ — Soos, as mentioned, hates cops and probably wanted to see me without having to play nice with one, beg that he give Soos another chance? Do I undergo this same exact song and dance with Soos, or just straight up stick them in the Get-Along Shirt and tell them to be nice children and learn to get along? Both are staples in my life at this point — so frankly, just like new puppies they need to get used to each other.

My phone buzzes. Alma. _So what ended up happening?_

 _Tbh I don’t think it could’ve gone worse,_ I reply. _They got into it and Soos stomped out, then I got into it with Dad and stomped out (sorta… just up to my room, fffff), and now I have no idea wtf I’m supposed to do. Like how do I go sit at dinner like ohai yeah I just slammed a door in y’all’s face. My aunt would’ve condemned me to a hundred years of straight up Fundamentalist existence._

 _Eh, just play it normal,_ Cerdo tells me. _I do that to my parents all the time, it actually doesn’t affect much at the dinner table minus the conversation’s more directed at my sisters than at me, lol._

 _True,_ I reply, and sigh out loud, rubbing at my suddenly aching forehead. _Dad and Babs DEF aren’t Tia Constanza._

 _Thank Jesus,_ Alma sends, and again, I sigh.

 _Come on,_ I say. _Constanza wasn’t all that bad._

I hold my phone, staring at the design in the throw rug on my wooden floor below my loft bed, a weird sense of missing my aunt running through me. As though on cue, I think on my mother, and an even worse sense of longing and grief threatens to chuck me off the bed entirely.

My phone buzzes, bringing me back to the here and now. I freeze when I see the text in the window.

From Soos: _Sorry about earlier. I don’t do well with cops. Probably should’ve kept it together more around your dad._

I sigh with a powerful feeling of relief, and reply. _It’s okay. Dad was kind of out of line. He should’ve at least let you explain yourself._

 _It is what it is,_ he sends. _He’s just being a dad, Dita. Look, are you busy later?_

I consider, feeling somehow better, but now experiencing a sort of dangerous curiosity.

 _Not really,_ I answer. _Why?_

_Want to meet me for coffee at that place on 12th?_

I stare at that text a second, a weird shake starting in my hands. 

_Sure,_ I tell him, and inwardly scream at myself. What am I even doing?! _I have to have dinner with Dad and Babs and get some work on my Bio project done so I don’t have to deal with it tomorrow or Sunday, but I can probably get away after. Is 10 okay?_

 _Yeah, Dino’s is 24/7,_ he answers. _We can talk more then._

 _Okay,_ I text.

 _Delete your messages in case your dad decides to check your phone,_ I receive. 

_Good thinking,_ I answer, and do so, then sit a moment on my bed, lost in thought.

Well, I’ve committed now. A part of me wants to at least _try_ to run it by my dad and get his permission so I don’t have to lie or be deceitful, but I know how that will go — not what I’d call well — so I might as well just go through with it, guilt be damned. Somehow, sneaking away rather than asking if I can go anywhere under false pretenses seems less anxiety-inducing. At least what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, or Babs.

Now the question becomes — how do I get there? It’s a good walk, about thirty blocks once I get out of our neighborhood. 

An idea occurs to me. I lift the phone, now ignoring the texts from Alma and Cerdo, and type.

  
  


*******

  
  


“Thanks for doing this, Uncle Jay,” I say, standing just outside the passenger side door. Lights and soft acoustic guitar music filter from Dino’s behind me. I glance over my shoulder, mentally taking stock of my funds. Just today I got my first paycheck from my new job, waiting tables in the dining room and doing light caregiving at Brighton Gardens Assisted Living a couple nights a week. It’s not what I’d call a hefty wage, but I can afford a few cups of coffee and some pastries. Cool.

Jason nods. “No problem. Just swear to me you’re not up to anything nefarious in there.”

“Scout’s honor, no,” I tell him. “It’s open mic night at a hipster coffee house, Jay. It’s just a bunch of geeks in there burning their tongues because they drank their coffee before it was cool and reading their evocative prose to each other.”

“Ah, so you’ll be in good company!”

I laugh. “Pot calling kettle, _Tio Empollon._ But… yeah, I can’t even deny it. Anyway — I just have a feeling Dad wouldn’t want me going out after what happened earlier, so…”

“I still maintain you should’ve given it a try — I think he’d have surprised you,” Jason tells me with a shrug. “It’s not like _you_ did anything wrong, not your fault your ex-trainer decided to act like a skeaze and caught it in the ass for it.”

I glower at him.

“Right, sorry. Just a nice dude who rightfully loathes cops.”

I nod with gusto.

Jason chuckles. “You want me to pick you up after open mic?”

“Nah, I’ll catch a ride with one of my friends. Promise you’ll keep this under wraps?”

“You can count on me, oh my Lourdy,” Jason says. “See ya later.”

I close the door, and wave. As he promised, Jay waits, and watches me to ensure I get inside the coffee shop safely. One more wave before I close the door, and off he goes, leaving me now to find Soos in this new place.

Finding him thankfully isn’t hard. He sits at a table close to the door, subtly flagging me down so as not to disturb the attendants listening to the music from the duo on stage. I make my way over, and am surprised when he stands to meet me before I can sit down to give me a hug. I laugh, hugging him back, noting that this is our first ever hug before he breaks away.

“Ahhh, _Azul Grande…_ I missed you, kid,” he tells me, sitting back down as I do the same. He indicates the mug across the table from him. “Got your favorite.”

“Eeee, hazelnut latte?” I exclaim happily, picking it up and sniffing the drink appreciatively. “Thanks, Soos — you didn’t have to, though, you know.”

He smiles, his warm, soft brown eyes aglow in the fairy lights. “Got paid finally, did you?”

I nod. “Paid working girl, right here.”

“Well, congrats,” he tells me. “Still, though, it’s the first time I’ve seen you in a while, so my treat, how’s that?”

“First round, fine,” I tell him, smiling and taking a sip. I pull off my coat and scarf and drape them over the back of my chair.

Again, he smiles. I have no idea how his eyes are always so _soft_ when he smiles, just perfectly clear and deep, rich brown under his thick lashes. 

“So now we’re alone and don’t have to worry about any outside influences… let’s legit catch up.” He inclines his head as he looks at me. “Your hair’s different.”

“Oh, yeah,” I say, fussing at a tress that hangs over my shoulder, “I just flat-ironed it.” 

“I like it,” he tells me, and I about die on the spot. “New clothes, as well, I take it?”

I nod. “Yeah. Barbara took me shopping.”

“You look good, kid.”

I _feel_ the heat in my face as I smile. “Thanks, Soos.”

“So how’ve things been?” 

“They’ve been really good, actually,” I say. “Just kind of settling in, school’s ironed out pretty well, made a handful of new pals, fight in April is coming up.” Without thinking, I continue, “Dad’s an unbelievable martial artist, on that note. Namely Muay Thai, but he’s a freakin’ _beast_ in BJJ, as well. So’s Barbara.”

I kick myself for bringing my dad up so casually when he literally just ran Soos off a few hours ago, but Soos smiles, eyes soft as ever.

“Got the impression there’s a beast behind that nice exterior. I’d hate to get a speeding ticket from him.” He leans back in his chair. “You getting along okay with your dad and stepmom so far?”

“Oh, yeah. Well, minus today. That was… kind of the first blip.”

He nods. “My bad.”

“Yeah… umm… about that… Look. I’m _really_ sorry that your first meeting went like that,” I say a little awkwardly, pushing my hair over my shoulder. Even flat-ironed, it’s still so long and heavy it doesn’t always behave the way I’d like it to. “Dad is normally super nice to _everyone —_ like he’s apparently even pretty cool with the criminals he picks up, or at least that’s what my Uncle Gannon told me.” I sigh. “I don’t really know what got into him, to be honest.”

Soos shrugs. “Probably the fact some random dude was skulking around his house. I just wanted to see you and didn’t want to go through your dad the cop to do so. I probably could’ve gone about it differently, but… hey, I do fights, not smarts.”

We both laugh. 

“Anyway, your dad was just being a dad. Makes sense, I mean… he’s not been there for your whole life, he’s just doing what he thinks is right or what dads are supposed to do and trying to do it in a hurry. I actually don’t blame him — I’d probably do the same thing in his position, although I’d be a _much_ bigger actual dick about it.” 

“You?” I chuckle. “Never.”

“Oh, yeah. I’m gonna be a real motherfucker when I’m a dad. Like the guy could be like ‘Hello, sir,’ and I’d be all, ‘You talked to me, you suck.’ Or, ‘He used the wrong fork, fuck him.’”

Again, I laugh. “In other words, your daughter could bring Jesus home and he still wouldn’t be good enough.”

“Damn straight,” he says. “And on that note, your boyfriends better watch their backs.”

I snort. “No boyfriends to report, Soos.”

“Good,” he says, “no heads I need to knock together.”

I laugh, heartened. 

The conversation flows in its usual ease from here, Soos telling me about his work with Drake’s here in the area, explaining to me what brought him to Jersey and the parts of the job he enjoys versus the parts that he doesn’t. (Never been a fan of dealing with default accounts, or signing up Karens.) We gripe about the cold weather while appreciating the beauty of so much snow. We listen to the poetry and music, chat over which ones we like versus the ones we don’t. I read an impromptu haiku over open mic per Soos’ very loud urging:

_Hazelnut latte_

_Sweet, foamy and delicious_

_You’re my best suitor_

It’s met with a smattering of laughs and a raucous whoop from Soos, and I make my way off the stage, trying to hide my face. 

“You did good,” he assures me, meeting me at the steps at the bottom of the stage, and throws an arm over my shoulder as we make our way back to our table to continue catching up and enjoying open mic.

When the evening disperses just after one in the morning, his phone beeps in his pocket on our way out of the shop, and he swears a bit under his breath. 

“Umm… I don’t know how to say this, but…” He gives me a regretful look.

“Do I need to call an Uber?” I ask humorously.

“Looks that way — got an emergency with a friend. I have to go pick him up. You going to be okay waiting for your ride?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I say. “Don’t forget, I handle myself pretty well.”

“True,” he says. “You’re a badass under that beautiful exterior.”

I huff, although I feel myself blush. “Oh, _basta ya.”_

“You really don’t know how gorgeous you are?” Soos chuckles.

I glower. “No. With the way guys at school look at me, you’d think I had a dick drawn on my face or something.”

“They’re just staring because they wish they could talk to you while knowing you’re way outta their league.”

“Oh, _pendejadas,”_ I say, laughing. “And legit, why are you gushing at me like this all of a sudden?”

He grins at me. “Because I’m not your trainer anymore, as your dad was so insistent on reminding us. It’s _okay_ to talk to you like this now.”

I giggle a bit, hating myself for it, but unable to help myself. “Aren’t I still a bit young for you?”

He smiles at me. “You are, but only for a few more years. I can at least make observations, can’t I?”

I push my hair over my shoulder. “I guess.” I smile back at him. “Thanks, Soos.”

“Anytime, _Azul Grande,”_ he says, then extends his arms to me. “Now come here and give me a hug before I go deal with my drunk and stranded idiot friend.”

I happily wrap my arms around his waist, leaning my face into his chest, abruptly aware of the warmth and shape of his body — lean, lithe, hard — against mine. My heart gets banging even as my face goes _hot,_ like center-of-the-sun hot, and my middle goes twisty and shivery. 

Soos steps back, and looking down at me, bumps my chin up. Something in those soft, soft, _soft_ eyes gets my heart going faster and my face even hotter, then a bolt of lightning goes through my center when he kisses my forehead. His lips linger there a moment, firm on my skin, then he cants in and _kisses me._

I freeze, feeling his lips warm against mine, soft as his eyes before he pulls away. 

“In case you or those idiot guys at school need reminding… you’re beautiful,” he says, nudging my cheek. “Don’t forget that, okay?”

I nod dumbly.

“See ya, kid.”

I mutely wave, every nerve buzzing like live electricity as he jauntily jogs off to his car parked up the way. I watch as he starts up the Honda and drives off, heading down the nearby alley out of sight.

I thump to my butt on the curb, breathing hard.

What was _that?_

I sit a second, ignoring the passersby that make their way past me where I sit, and fight to collect myself. It’s the first time a guy’s ever hugged me like that — and it was my first kiss, too.

If you could even call it that, though — Alma would insist that legit spit would have to be exchanged to count as the fabled _First Kiss,_ that mystical rite of passage that rockets one from girlhood to womanhood faster even than the unwanted visitor that likes to wreak monthly havoc. However, Soos didn’t even really _do_ anything during that liplock — no tongue, no open mouth, no actual spit detected. It wasn’t much more than a peck — closed-mouthed, tight-lipped, a nanosecond in length. 

I really wonder what on earth is going to happen between us now, if anything from this point. I _am_ still underage, which makes me feel like _screaming_ sometimes — if I were just _a little older,_ I could do a lot of things. 

Not to mention, Dad will shit a pile of bricks if he catches wind of this. 

Well, I’ll have to worry about that part of things later — for the moment, I need to find a ride home. Pulling my phone out of my coat pocket, I tap the screen to spin it up, then grumble a swear word when the screen remains blank. I try to power it on, only to be given the charge icon. Dang thing is dead as a doornail. 

Great. I sigh, and consider. Home is a long, but… mostly manageable haul; however, the Haven has a reputation for being seedy and dangerous at night.

Well, whatever. I at least know I can protect myself, and it’s not like I never walked around LA at night in all sorts of interesting areas. I rise, and start off on a path to home. If I come by a Lyft or cab service kiosk, I’ll call in a ride then. Bus services are also a thought, not to mention they have nice little glass walls that are somewhat insulating against the powerful wind.

Not real invested in my surroundings as I walk, I think about Soos, and also how I’ll make it inside undetected this late. Dad has Eufy set up around the house, although for some mysterious reason the back deck remains a blind spot. Maybe I can make my way in through the back door?

I chuckle to myself, thinking about what a standard way of sneaking in that is, and hang a right to get on the main strip home, all but floating off the ground as I walk. I wonder what Alma will say when I tell her what just happened with Soos. She’ll either get me in one of her nasty RNCs or just go puke green with envy. I sag as I walk, thinking on that. The thought was initially amusing, but a little flash of anxiety flits through my middle when I realize she might get genuinely jealous. It’s no secret she crushes _hard_ on our trainer, just like I do.

Oof. And now the truth is out, even to myself. It’s a Crush, a real one, cupids and flowers and everything. 

I heave a sigh, and wonder what I’m supposed to do now. Dad doesn’t like him. My stepmom doesn’t like him. My best friend Likes — capital L Likes — him. When did I sign up for so much teen angst?

I speed up, fighting the cold, now just wanting to get home, take a hot bath, and process everything that’s happened. I’m _so_ glad tomorrow is Saturday, and outside of training in the morning, there’s not a lot to do. At least I’ll have time to just relax and _think._

A flurry of movement catches my eye, and I glance over my shoulder. The sidewalks are fairly quiet at this hour, with only a handful of stragglers and cars moving along, but the second I look, I _know —_ the guys that have fallen into step at my back are deliberately following me.

A thrill of fear goes through me, animating all of my reflexes and throwing my awareness and instincts into overdrive. The dudes at my back are, to a man, visibly built, flat-eyed and dangerous. If they’ll pick a teenaged girl out of an entire city, they’d have to be especially degenerate lowlifes. Granted, though, it could simply be the nice red peacoat, it could be the authentic Dr. Martens, it could be the fact that I look clean and cared for, indicating a presumably fat purse. Maybe it’s all of the above. But it hits me like a straight right that regardless of—or _because_ of—my age, I’m prime trim for criminals, walking by myself like this. And these guys — strangely _classy-looking_ thugs, okay, but doubtless thugs all the same — have just felt free to target me as such. 

I face forward, and pick up the pace, about to dive into the nearest bus shelter or hurl myself in front of the first halfway friendly-looking driver I see. I keep an eye out for businesses that are still open at this hour — even some seedy dive bar is safer than the open street with these miscreants behind me. 

Then, I hear the pounding of speeding footfalls behind me. Hissing a quick and fully heartfelt “ _Fuck,”_ I break into a sprint without thinking or looking behind me. 

I hurl myself forward at speeds so quick I almost lose my footing, but thankfully don’t, and just give it everything I’ve got while the thundering steps increase in cadence. My heart’s going at such a rate I can feel it in my ears and head, blurring my vision into a small tunnel of what’s just in front of me. I don’t need to actively look to know there’s no one on this stretch of pavement, my phone is dead, no cars are anywhere in sight — I’m on my own. 

I feint left, as though I’m about to dodge into the street, but then hang a hard right into the alley between two reaching buildings. I hear the men shouting, but they sound farther away now, and I double my efforts, racing to the opposite end of the alley, figuring I’ll take the maze of streets that craft a labyrinth through this swatch of apartment buildings and _pray_ I don’t get lost in the process. 

I cartwheel my arms and skid to a stop when _more_ men appear around the corners of the buildings at the end of the alley. I turn on my heel, then see the same guys from before, advancing on me now from the opposite end.

“Oh, damn—” I breathe, vacillating now. I made a _hugely_ stupid error running into this alley like a dumb bunny—

“Take it easy, kid,” one of the men says, walking toward me. “We’re not gonna rough you up too bad if we don’t have to.”

“Chasing me into this alley contradicts everything about that statement,” I say, slowly shifting my stance, readying myself with as much subtlety as I can manage. I can fight, okay, but that’s one on one against a girl roughly my weight and in an octagon with a ref present. I just _hope_ I won’t have to test my skills on the street right now. 

Not to mention, if I get clubbed or worse and left to freeze like a hunk of steak in this alley, I don’t even want to _think_ about what that will do to Dad and Barb. 

“You got a mouth on you, girl,” one of the guys says. “I’d watch it if I were you, given there’s six of us and one of you.”

“Hold up — being mouthy is one of the hallmarks of Tiger Shark’s little pets,” says the first guy. “I think we found ourselves a minnow, boys.” 

I stare a second, my muscles tensing up more and more with each step this first guy starts taking toward me. “What are you _talking_ about—”

Guy One snatches my arm, and using his grip and bodyweight against him, I throw a knee with all my heft behind it into his groin, then drive my heel down on his instep. He stumbles to his butt and then to his side, swearing in a burst of spittle, and as though that’s a signal to his buddies, they leap into action.

I’m already running for the end of the alley, about to play Red Rover with the assholes guarding this escape route, ready to call my teeth into duty if need be. There’s no ref to stop me here—and this is a _real_ fight now, one that if I lose, I die. And in the moment, there’s no room for fear—only action.

I skirt the first guy, ruck hard with the second, and spin away to move as fast as I can toward the end of the alley and _freedomohmigodfreedom_. The sudden bark of a gunshot, coupled with a _hiss_ and _ping,_ sends me to the ground on my front. I strike my chin on the asphalt and brutalize my wrists and heels of my hands. I lie a second, playing dead long enough to take stock of my injuries— _did_ I just get shot?

Seems I didn’t, given I’m not in any form of shock, nothing’s screaming at me that I’m hurt overly badly, and other than blobs of blood coming from my chin, there’s no more to show for anything. I inhale, my heart shivering back into motion, terror now overtaking any form of rational thinking. The saying is never bring your fists to a gunfight — and I realize there’s not much opportunity for me to escape with my life at this point unless the First Hero to Blüdhaven decides to randomly show up (and rumor has it he’s been packing it in early these days.)

“One more step and I’ll splatter your pretty face all over this fuck ugly alley,” one of the men snarls, and if I was terrified a second ago, there aren’t words for what I feel when the blistering heat of smoking metal jams against my temple. “Which'll get me in the shit, since a headshot's not part of the grand, master plan. Just make this easy on us and thereby easier on your young and dumb self, got it?”

My chin and jaw are entirely numb minus the pulsating that corresponds with my wild heartbeat. A hand squeezes my underarm and yanks me to my feet, one beefy forearm then closing across my throat with the barrel of the weapon pressed against my head. I hold my breath a moment, then unwittingly start hyperventilating like a snared rabbit.

“So tell us something, kid — you’ve been doing work for some dangerous people,” the guy hisses into my ear, his breath like a furnace blast against my skin. 

“Brighton Gardens?” I ask, genuinely mystified, my breath huffing in rapid bursts of condensation. 

“No, you fucking idiot,” the guy says. “Tiger Shark.”

“What are you _talking_ about —”

“Don’t play dumb with us, kid,” he growls. “You’re his little pet from Cali. And he thought we wouldn’t track you all the way up here to deliver him a little message, well, like you he’s a dumb kid and he was dead wrong. Zsasz — you’re up.”

Some bald guy appears out of the shadows, one I didn’t take notice of in the original count of thugs, one that just going on looks makes me think I’m now past the point of real trouble, which was what I was in a second ago. His eyes are abnormally wide and bright in the scant light of the alley, leering with a glint that’s _far_ from sane. Beneath his suit jacket, his collared shirt is open in spite of the cold, baring the scars of countless nicks and cuts that look like tallies all over his torso. In his hand is a silver knife, the blade as long as my forearm.

“Considerate of you to hold her for me, Munchen,” says this Zsasz character, grinning widely as he comes up to me. My chest is leaping underneath… Munchen’s? grasp. “Bit of a mad cat, isn’t she?” 

“Just a bit,” Munchen agrees. “Most privileged little girls like her would’ve passed out by now.”

“One of Tiger Shark’s for sure, then,” Zsasz murmurs, coming up so close to me I can pick out the tally scars that line his neck under his jaw, traveling up one side of his face. 

Through the surging tides of adrenaline and fear, there’s a continuing rush of confusion, as well — what is going on with this _Tiger Shark_ person and _why_ are these men so convinced I have anything to do with him? 

“She’s definitely his type,” Zsasz observes. “Wide-eyed and trusting…”

“I have _no_ idea what you’re talking about,” I blurt out. “I don’t even know who this _Tiger Shark_ is —” 

“Sure, kid, sure,” Zsasz dismisses. “All right, boys, let’s get to work. Carmine said to deliver her body—”

“Wait—as in _kill_ her?” one of the goons asks, although his voice seems muffled as I start frantically grasping at any sort of a plan that can get me out of this mess.

“Rules have been lifted, Burns—what do you think Zsasz is here for, to give her a neck rub?” Munchen says. “That asshole murdered Liza. It’s only fair at this point.”

“Damn it, I already said, I don’t even know who Tiger Shark is!” I shout, desperate now. “I have no idea who you think you have here, but I’m telling you, I’m not her!”

“Yes, you are,” Zsasz says, calm as ever. “I know who you are, what your involvement in this is.” He twirls the knife. “Interesting you don’t.”

“Standard TS MO,” Munchen says. “Let’s get this over with, Zsasz. He wants to leave Liza stuffed in the mouth of a killer whale in Carmine’s office, we’ll leave this bitch dead in the mouth of a tiger shark on the deck of that damn boat he’s so proud of to remind him who he’s dealing with, here.”

“Damn straight,” Zsasz murmurs, grinning with an eerie light in his eye. “Be a darling and pull her head back, will you, Munchen?”

The barrel of the gun lifts, fingers now fisting my hair, and Zsasz raises the blade. 

“Don’t worry, kid…” he says, the weapon held over his head, my feet infuriatingly trapped under Munchen’s, my arms all but useless. In this second, I stupidly and uselessly think about my dad, wishing he’d Show Up with a hundred cop cars. I’ll take whatever punishment he wants to give me for sneaking out at this point. “This’ll be quick, promise. Won’t even know what hit you.”

Then, with the suddenness of a meteor, there’s an explosion of smoke that goes up in a detonative burst next to me. The arms and legs that grasp me loosen, and I hit the ground on my seat, hearing the reports of bewildered voices echoing around me. A strong hand grasps my forearm and yanks me to my feet before I can fight or protest, and it’s now I come face to face with the First Hero to Blüdhaven — dark hair whipping in the wind of the alley, face obscured under the black Domino mask, the blue sigil on his chest clear even through the smoke. 

“Get down,” he orders, nudging me away with no trace of aggression or anger, only an insistence that I can’t help but heed. I find a pile of trashbags and a dumpster a little ways off, and crouch, peering around the corner, fighting now to catch my breath and just wrap my head around everything that’s happened up until now.

Well, there’s no chance for head-wrapping, because seeing the real, live Nightwing — not my dad, okay, but freaking _Nightwing —_ up close in real life like this can only be described as awe-inspiring. He moves through the crowd of goons with an almost comical ease, a blur of pivoting arms and legs and Kali sticks — _Escrima? Wow_ — through sparks of gunfire and wheeling weaponry. The thought that I’d fork over my eye teeth to move so _gracefully_ in the fight flits through my mind amid the haze of adrenaline. The goons all lie on the ground in tangles of limp, heavy limbs before long, with Zsasz just kind of hanging back, watching with the air of someone spectating a game of Skeeball, his blade resting like a baseball bat against his shoulder. 

“Well, long time, no see, Nightwang,” Zsasz says as Nightwing approaches him. “Wondered what the hell was taking you so long — rumor has it you might’ve been in early retirement. Seen so little of you these days.”

“You know you missed me,” Nightwing says.

“I did, kind of,” Zsasz says with a chuckle. “You’ve always made the same old shit somewhat interesting.”

“Well, here I am keeping it interesting—not about to let you just run around dismembering innocent girls to prove a point to some lowlife wannabe Jack Sparrow —”

The strike that Nightwing levels Zsasz with comes so quickly it’s a blur, almost invisible to track with the human eye, and although Zsasz is quick to rebound and the fight escalates _fast_ , it remains in Nightwing’s favor. I watch, entranced, as he shifts and moves like water, the glowing Kali sticks flowing like glow sticks in the darkness of the alley in swift whirls, the aggression in his motions unmatched. Each blow he delivers looks like do-or-die, punctuated by harsh, angry battle cries, the hurl of his body furious and quick as the Flash.

“Oh, buddy, you _mad_ tonight,” Zsasz observes, engaged in this dance with Nightwing, his first knife joined by a second. “One would think the kind-hearted hero of Blüdhaven was all kinds of personally pissed off—”

“Brutally murdering an innocent girl with the intent to stuff her body in a dead, near threatened species does that to me,” Nightwing growls, whipping a Kali stick in a powerful backhand strike that successfully connects with Zsasz’s jaw. He rocks back, a spray of blood arcing through the air, his heels skidding over the ground. He rights himself, spitting away a tooth that got knocked loose under the savage hit. It lands with a rattle not far from me, and despite my thundering heart, I grimace. Ugh. I pull away slightly, but refocus on the fight in front of me, my heart zooming at lightning speed as I watch, unable to look away. 

“Oh, yeah,” Zsasz murmurs, his tone shifted now as he dislodges another tooth. “You mad.”

“Yeah,” Nightwing says, falsely pleasant, jauntily spinning a Kali stick in one hand. “I mad.”

And again, he leaps to attack, the blue lights of the sticks swirling in rapid figure-eights and serpentine motions, deftly deflecting Zsasz’s blades. God, this is like a train wreck — one of those things that you’re scared to see continue, but just can’t wrest your eyes from, however you try. It’s a terrifying thought that if Nightwing doesn’t emerge victorious from this high-energy scrap, I’ll be left alone with this bald-pated lunatic in the middle of an alley in Blüdhaven. The idea that maybe I should get my butt up off the ground and take off for home while my outta-nowhere enemy is distracted goes through my brain, but it’s though I’ve been glued to the spot by some giant artist, hypnotized by what’s happening in front of me.

As Nightwing’s furious offensive gains traction, he thrusts a heel into Zsasz’s midsection — exposed for the briefest second — and pushes his opponent farther back. A lunge forward sees a blow to Zsasz’s collarbone, but a glancing shot with the blade against Nightwing’s side in return as they pass one another as though in a joust. 

“Look at you, old pal — so mad you’re getting careless,” Zsasz observes, waggling the bloody knife. “Got a blood count on you.”

“’Tis but a scratch,” Nightwing says, not the least bit concerned about the cut in his side. He waggishly smiles, assuming an open guard stance. “You going to stop there, or are you going to come bite my legs off, Victor?”

“He says as he dumps blood all over the alley,” Zsasz says. “Gotta say, I _did_ somewhat miss you — only _you_ could crack _Monty Python_ jokes after taking a blade to the side.”

“A flesh wound!” Nightwing exclaims, and then just like that, he’s launched back on the attack. The Kali sticks spiral, this time coming down on Zsasz’s forearm with a sharp, distinctive _crack._ The blade in that hand clatters to the asphalt, joined by the other after a roundhouse to the opposite wrist. Now he’s disarmed, Nightwing mule kicks Zsasz in the abdomen, holsters the sticks, then initiates a grapple. With his opponent now on the ground, he lifts a bit.

“Let me make one thing abundantly, crystal, perfectly, I’ll hold your hand like a small child and walk you through it clear,” Nightwing growls. “You come within so much as a parsec of that girl again, if any of Falcone’s goons even _think_ about her in passing again, if any of those bastards ever consider her name while doing their little gangster thing again — I’ll forget _very, very_ quickly about my moral code and rules. You get me?” He pushes an elbow into Zsasz’s throat. “And you can relay that shit to Falcone.”

Zsasz seems remarkably unperturbed, and when the flooding headlights of motorcycles and cars bounce through the shadows of the alley, he flat-out laughs. 

“Oh, yeah,” he says, now going into a butterfly guard, “you _really_ mad, First Hero to the Haven.” 

Nightwing lets him up, somersaulting out from under the attempted offensive, and backtracks close to where I hide. He turns to me, and extends a hand.

“Come with me,” he says, and again, there’s an authority inherent in his voice that’s equal parts urgent and benevolent — and besides, I’d rather get yanked out of here by Nightwing than dispatched by some mobster’s skeazy hitmen. Zsasz is on his way over to us as we speak, grinning and leering. That clinches whatever decision I might have deliberated over, and I take hold of Nightwing’s proffered hand. 

He pulls me to him, and with the sense that the world just fell out from under us with a neck-breaking jolt, the alley disappears in a blur. Next thing I know, we’re on the roof overlooking it—how did _that_ happen? When my vision clears a bit, I see that he clasps my wrist, the other hand gripping a grappling hook. Oh.

He urges me into a run toward the next building over. My heart bangs so fast I can barely see or comprehend what’s happening — I just hope I haven’t lost my phone out of my pocket with everything that’s just gone down.

“You okay?” Nightwing asks, again pulling me to him in an entirely non-creepy fashion, launching us to the ground below by way of the hookshot. I take a breath, running in tandem with him now down the alley toward a backstreet. 

“Uh, yeah,” I say, my brain still not quite caught up to the moment. My voice shakes with an embarrassing tremor, but right now, dignity seems _way_ overrated. “I mean, I think — can’t say I like zooming up and down buildings much or getting waylaid by a fistful of creeps in a back alley in Blüdhaven, but it’s better than dead and stuffed in the body of a shark, anyway?”

“Are you hurt?” Nightwing asks, pausing at the corner of the alley. Before I can answer, both of us note the approaching vehicles, coming down the opposite road, nearing us. He takes my wrist, and we keep moving down the next street, sheltered from view by the building beside us.

For all the overpowering fury he exhibited below, Nightwing is gentle with me, kind and soft-spoken. Something about him resonates with a familiarity that I can’t help but immediately, instinctively trust. I don’t know if I’ve run into his civilian identity in the city at some point, if he’s someone I might unknowingly have been introduced to, or if it’s the fact that I’ve seen old media clips of him before he went radio silent with the press — but he puts me quickly at ease, much the way my dad did when I first met him.

I follow Nightwing, grateful for him, although I do still find myself inexplicably wanting to see my father ASAP. I can’t explain what this sudden _need_ is, but it’s there, and clamoring, all the same.

Nightwing presses an unseen button on his wrist guard, and a Tomahawk motorcycle shimmers into view. I take one second to feel awed by this space age display of camouflaging technology before I realize I’m expected to take a ride on this thing. With _Nightwing._

“Get on,” he tells me. “They’re getting close.” 

Sure enough, the headlamps are nearing. Okay, don’t have to tell me twice. I leap atop the bike, to Nightwing’s front, facing him as he directs. 

“Okay — you’re gonna want to _hold on —_ and I _mean_ hold on,” he tells me, spinning up the bike with a mighty roar, and something about the dramatic sound of the engine makes me want to fall into a gale of entirely inappropriate, poorly timed laughter. 

“Trust me, you don’t have to yank my arm on that one,” I say, gripping him as the motorcycle accelerates with a terrifying sense of zero gravity. 

Looking over his shoulder, I see what appears to be a fleet of vehicles — six cars, three motorcycles — pulling in behind us to give chase. 

“Can I ask one question before we focus on escaping?” I ask, then lose an undignified squeak when pops of gunfire hiss around us. “Why the hell are they after _me?!_ Last I checked, this isn’t a freakin’ YA novel — I’m not actually _special!”_

“We can get into that later,” Nightwing tells me. “For now, just hold tight. I’m going to get you out of here.”

I squeeze the crap out of Nightwing’s middle, probably strangling him from the guts up, not caring as the gangster cavalry amplifies its pursuit. In response, the Tomahawk launches forward at speeds that might as well fire us off to the moon. I’m not one to say no to an adrenaline rush — but this is hedging on a little much even for my hithertofore brave self. It’s one thing to ride a rollercoaster with the likelihood of death being so low in the percentile that it’s not even worth considering — it’s another to ride on an updated motorcycle that’s not even _remotely_ street legal with its most recent top speed of 480mph. I can’t imagine Nightwing’s version of this same bike doesn’t actually go _faster._ Crashing at that rate will basically send you home in about fifty separate body bags _after_ the street cleaners Squee-gee you off the asphalt. 

Which, I think, will be my fate in the next few minutes, as the bike lurches in a nauseating turn down an alley, up a flight of steps, over a balcony, and then takes a mad leap over the railing and down to the sidewalk below. There are a handful of straggling pedestrians at this hour, and all scatter like roaches as Nightwing thunders the cycle over the walkway. 

“Excuse me, pardon me, coming through!” he calls, and the onlookers acquiesce with a readiness that, under other circumstances, might have inspired me to make a Moses joke about parting the Red Sea. However, I’m a little too jacked on straight-up terror after that flight through the air on a glorified crotch rocket to do much more than grip Nightwing so hard I’m shocked he can even speak. 

At the slower rate of speed that Nightwing applies while gunning the bike over the sidewalk, I think that _maybe_ if we weren’t being hounded by mobsters with a great deal of overpowered weaponry, causing my newfound knight and steed to perform all sorts of crazy stunts to provide some evasive maneuvering, this ride on the motorcycle might be kind of fun. But unfortunately, this isn’t a leisurely ride through the city on an illegal vehicle, and once we’re off the sidewalk, it’s back to the races — and now, we’re facing another line of cars belonging to our enemies. What civilian vehicles are out now have bumped off, shifting well out of the way, the drivers apparently used to such displays of criminal activity in this city that they know what to do when it falls on them.

“All this backup, just for us,” Nightwing says. “See, you _are_ actually special. Do me a favor and put your right leg up — quick.”

I do, although I feel like I’m about to get shot right off the bike as he chickens it straight at the line of new cars. A spray of bullets peppers the air around us, and I feel one arm go around my torso, pulling me down slightly. The bike goes almost flat to the ground on one side, sending my heart into my throat, skidding along as Nightwing cuts it hard to turn down the next street toward the water. 

It’s now the sound of another cycle’s engine joins us as we head toward the separating bridge that crosses the estuary. I dare turn my head to look, and see the familiar sight of a red helmet and leather jacket on the bike beside us. There’s a second of confusion — Gotham’s Red Hood is here?

“Get moving, Big Bird,” he calls to Nightwing. “I’ll hold these assholes off for a while. There’s more inbound from Tenth.”

“Appreciate it, Little Wing,” he says. “Kindly don’t kill anyone while you’re here.”

“Just some car windows and tires, Golden Boy!” he shouts, and Red Hood zooms off toward our pursuers. I watch over Nightwing’s shoulder, fascinated, as he darts in and out of the cars, dodging the responding gunfire, and returning his own. Some straggling motorcycles pull away from the fracas, giving chase behind us. 

“Okay, if you were holding tight before, now you’re going to want to choke the life right out of me, understand?” Nightwing says, now gunning it toward the bridge. I just nod and hope he notices, tightening my already strangulating hold on him. 

He lowers one hand to his utility belt, pulling out one of those specially shaped throwing stars that he and other well-equipped vigilantes favor. I turn my head enough to watch as he hurls it toward the operating post at the edge of the bridge. It sparks and shifts its trajectory under a bullet from an incoming goon, the guy appearing out of the clear blue sky on a cycle from an adjoining road. The star misses its target.

“Bro,” Nightwing says, scandalized, and takes another shuriken from his belt. He whips it toward his original target, and this time, the responding fire from the mobster misses, and the star hits its intended bulls-eye.

“Yeah, first try!” Nightwing celebrates, then chucks one more shuriken at the new motorcyclist. It lodges in the front tire, bursting into smoke, sending the bike to its side in a flurry of sparks. The unfortunate guy on the cycle goes rolling off in a spectacular tumble. Gunfire from the goons behind us lights up the night, a disquieting _ping_ off the back of the cycle resonating in humming waves.

“Okay,” Nightwing tells me. “Hang on.”

I do, still looking over my shoulder, and it’s now I see the separating bridge lifting.

“Oh, my god, you’re not,” I say. 

The motorcycle leaps forward into a speed that leaves me breathless, and I turn my head back to face Nightwing.

“You’re not —” I repeat.

“Just hold on,” he says.

“Oh, _Jesucristo,_ you are,” I say, and I swear my life passes before my eyes in this moment. All the gunfire from the people chasing us, and I’m going to eat it trying to fly across a separated bridge on a motorcycle with some dude I met maybe a few minutes ago.

“Lourdes,” he says as the bike flies toward the rising bridge, and I look up in spite of my fear, wondering how in the name of all things holy Nightwing knows my name, “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, do you understand? Just hold on tight — I’m getting you out of this, I swear.” 

I can’t help but feel a little heartened by this, although I tighten my hold as the bike continues to increase in speed, and I feel the lift as the wheels hit the incline, climbing the rising bridge. 

_Here goes,_ I think, holding my breath, _oh, jeez, we’re gonna die —_

“Okay, hang tight, time to leave these lowlifes behind...” Nightwing says, apparently not the remotest bit nonplussed, and I _feel_ it as the ground goes out from under us. The wind sends my hair into flapping wildly around my face and Nightwing’s shoulders, the only indication that we’re not suspended in air, about to haul to the water below. I’m holding him so hard my arms are a pair of bent, shaking planks, my eyes squeezed shut so that sparklers light up behind my eyelids.

There’s a tremendous jerk and twitch in the bike, a sharp juddering, and then the bike zooms downward — the ground clearly under the tires again. I risk opening my eyes, just as we hit the near ninety-degree connector between the bridge and road. The water and lifted bridge stand between us and our pursuers now, and Nightwing pulls the bike into the streets that create a grid pattern of roads between the waterside townhouses. 

After a few moments, I discover we’re traveling at normal speeds, and I slowly relax my grip, my heart still shuddering in my neck. I take a breath, and take stock of our surroundings as the world gradually returns to its usual passage of time. My senses remain on hyper-alert, my awareness still laser focused, my body on a hair trigger — the same feeling I get before a fight, only on steroids. 

The BPD is a block or so away, a spot of bright lights in this dim quadrant of the Haven. In the growing light, I notice Nightwing’s side is still dribbling blood, the stuff leaking in trails from the cut in his side.

“Oh, my god, you’re bleeding,” I exclaim.

“Am I?” Nightwing says, and looks down. “Oh, crap, I’m sorry. Got nicked back there — I didn’t bleed all over you or anything, did I?”

I shake my head. “No. Are you — I mean, are you _okay?”_

“Hm? Oh, yeah, that’s nothing. I won’t even feel it tomorrow. More importantly —” He stops the bike and powers it down outside the BPD building, and lays his hands on my arms to separate us a bit. He checks my chin, which feels stiff by now, the blood clotted around the wound. “Did they hurt you? Are you all right?”

“They didn’t hurt me, I’m fine,” I assure him. “Minus the idea I might’ve been stuffed in a dead shark for reasons I don’t even know, and thinking on what that would do to my dad and stepmom… I mean, I might or might not have snuck out, I don’t even know if they know I’m gone.” 

“They know,” Nightwing says, “given the situation at hand. They’re on their way now. Once you've given your report here, they'll take you home.”

“I, uh... take it you know my dad? That’s how you know my name?” I ask.

“Something like that,” he says, and slides off the bike. “Come on. I’ll walk you inside.”

I get down, and try to hide how powerfully my whole body is shaking as I follow Nightwing toward the entryway to the BPD building. I stop at the door, suddenly afraid to go in. I take a breath, and hover, staring at a spot on the silver beveling that lines the doorframe.

I’m not scared of being punished. I’m not upset that I got caught in sneaking out. I’m not angry that I’ll have to face the music.

Instead, I find I’m grotesquely _ashamed —_ overwhelmed all at once by a curb-stomping guilt. I don’t want to face my father and Babs, knowing that I snuck out of the house, and even if I didn’t do it to go out drugging or enjoying age-inappropriate drinks with hoodlums and burn-outs, I still did it to meet someone they don’t at all approve of and almost got myself killed in the process.

A part of me also kind of wants to smack Soos for leaving me to make my own way home the way he did, although I know he couldn’t have anticipated I’d suddenly find myself in a heap of crap like I did after years of doing the same without incident in Los Angeles.

“Hey,” Nightwing says. “Chin up, kiddo. I can promise you with total confidence — it’ll be okay. Maybe not bump-free — but it’ll be okay.”

I look up at him, and try to smile, but fail. “Thanks.” I pause. “And umm… thank you, by the way. For showing up like you did. Kind of embarrassing I needed the help, but…” I inhale, and this time, smile with success. “Thank you.”

He smiles under his mask, and again, that same feeling of recognition goes through me. I _swear_ I know him — even if I don’t know just how. 

“Any time,” Nightwing says, and just now, Gannon appears at the door.

“Oh, my God, Dita —” he says, and rushes out to hug me. “Are you okay?”

I nod as a rush of relief to see my uncle goes through me, and I gratefully hug him in return. I never knew _hugging_ people could be so amazing before I moved here, and I'll say it's only more so in times like these. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m all right.”

As Gannon ushers me inside, I look over my shoulder, and watch as Nightwing somehow just goes _poof_ as though by some kind of ninja magic into the shadows by the building. I take a breath, and get ready to face the music.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tio Empollon: Uncle Nerd  
> Azul Grande: Big Blue  
> Pendejadas: Bullshit


	9. Wholesome Amish Living

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heya!!
> 
> Thanks ya, AJ_McCleod, for being your wonderful, amazing, angelic self. <3 I owe you all the hugs and love and gratitude not just for being the best beta ever, but also for just being an awesome person. EVERYONE LOVE THIS AMAZING HUMAN!!!
> 
> Happy reading, y'all! :D
> 
> Xoxoxoxoxoxo,  
> ~EF

**CHAPTER 9: Wholesome Amish Living**

  
  


_Dick_

  
  


“You know, I’d never have pegged you to be so into these sensitive tunes,” Babs says, chuckling as I crawl over her. I nuzzle her neck, and hum a bit to the music. 

“I have my moments in which I pretend to be a sensitive dude,” I tell her, crossing my arms over her chest, gazing at her in the lamplight. “You’re beautiful tonight, by the way.”

She snorts. “Speaking of. You say that _every_ night.”

“Well, it’s just as true tonight as it was last night,” I tell her, and lean forward to kiss her.

“Just remember to keep it down,” Babs tells me after a moment of increasingly heated smooches. “You’re a screamer, you know, and the last thing I want to do is be responsible for Dita’s PTSD.”

“Eh, she’s long since been asleep,” I murmur, feeling free now to cop a feel under Babs’ cami, “but you can smother me with a pillow, anyway.”

“I’ll just stick a gag ball in that cry pipe,” Babs says, grinning. “You talk too much.”

I kiss her lips, and between each one, I breathe all sorts of stupid praises to her — telling her she’s gorgeous, she’s perfect, she’s everything to me, she’s smarter than I am by a trillion standard deviations, she could physically destroy me anytime she wanted. She’s laughing by the time I get her top off and get a faceful of her flawless breasts. 

“Still want me to shut up?” I ask her, grinning up at her.

“Actually… nah, you can keep going,” she says.

It still amazes me, how naturally loving Barbara really came after everything that happened. It didn’t come immediately, or even quickly — for a long, long time, I didn’t want to be in overly close proximity to others, keeping myself apart from loved ones while in the same room, preferring space and experiencing a profound discomfort when touched. It took years to even start regularly hugging friends again, and even longer before I felt any sense of _desire_. Re-assimilating touch and safety had to come first, and it was a quite a few sessions with Dinah and other professionals (and yes, a handful of meds for a while) until closeness shed the mantle of _wrongness_ and _danger_ that it had donned in Catalina’s wake. For what seemed an eternity after I was shot, I wondered if I’d ever make love again — or even just accept an embrace. 

Like most things, though, it all came gradually, each new step just kind of taken when my mind and body got together and determined they were ready. The first time Babs and I took the step returning to lovemaking was our wedding night — and honestly, it couldn’t have felt more right, or more cathartic. It was as much for her as it was for me — after endless treatments and rehab (that still continue to this day), Barbara was on her feet, dancing with me at our reception, sensate to my touch, everything falling into place for both of us with the feeling of new beginnings.

I pause in my ministrations, thinking on all of this, and just rest my forehead against Barbara’s a moment. 

“I love you,” I whisper to her.

“Love you more, stud,” she whispers back. 

It’s not long before we’re going at it, mindful of the noise levels. A handful of times, my phone pings the text tone on the nightstand, but I ignore it, focusing on Babs. I already patrolled the city — everything was quiet, with only a drunken college student to shepherd back to his dorm, a bicycle theft to thwart, and a dispute between an Uber driver and passenger to resolve. If someone’s trying to yank me into work or duty, they can dang well wait.

When I start singing Hallelujah, no more capable of helping myself than I would be to stop a hurricane, Babs claps her hand over my mouth, giggling wildly. That gets me going, too — at least once my peak rescinds, anyway. I take a breath once I’ve settled, then just lie breathing atop my wife a second, one hand clasping hers, feeling her other as it strokes my hair. I sigh when she kisses my forehead. 

Then, like a barking alarm into a deep sleep, the damn phone starts ringing — no longer merely informing me of a text. I grumble and reach for my cell to answer it. 

It’s Jason.

“Jay,” I say irritably into the mic, “this had better be important, like world security important or Dita’s sneaking around with that lowlife Santiago important.”

“It’s the latter, Dickie,” Jason says flatly. 

I draw up short. “Wait — _what?”_

“Yeah,” he says. “I picked her up a few hours ago on the DL to take her to open mic night at Dino’s with her friends… or so she told me, anyway. I swung back because I didn’t feel comfortable leaving her to get a ride with some teenager at this ungodly hour, and guess who fucking kissed her fifteen-year-old ass goodnight and up and _left_ her to call an Uber or hoof it or God knows what.”

A fire unlike any I’ve ever experienced rises in me like an enraged dragon, and I lift up, with Barbara frowning askance at me. For a moment, I’m utterly speechless, incapable of cognizant speech.

“And before you ask why I didn’t pick her up,” Jason says, “I’d prefer to stay the cool uncle who doesn’t have to discipline her.”

I shake my head in an effort to clear it.

“Jason, I repeat —” I growl, “ _what?”_

  
  


*******

  
  


Ugh, what a night. Every muscle in my body aches — it’s been _months_ since I last saw that much action. I’m getting too old for this — not to mention, I don’t think I’ve _ever_ been so utterly, completely terrified in all my life. And that’s saying something, given I’ve seen shit — and some stuff. But honestly, the sight of those thugs clutching my daughter while Zsasz advanced on her sent me into territory the likes of which I’ve hitherto never navigated. Artemis and Wally, Roy, Raquel, Karen, Bruce, even… they have all expressed the level of fear you experience for your children, be they by blood or by taken responsibility — but while I thought I understood it then, I realize now I had _no_ idea just how far that fear can stretch.

Finally back at home, I stand at the kitchen table across from where Lourdes sits. She stares at the wooden surface, her arms tight to her sides, the bandage on her chin illuminated under the yellow glow of the string lights under the cabinetry. 

“Dad,” she mumbles, fixated on the table. 

“Hmm.”

“I am _so_ sorry,” she says, her arms tightening around herself. 

I sigh, softening. For as furious as I was, and still am, really — in this moment, I’m just so unimaginably _relieved_ that my daughter is all right and (mostly) unharmed. Going on how she comported herself while she gave her statement to the police, her acceptance of not only going into protective custody at home for a few weeks — which means no more trips to Gotham or even just going to school, she’ll be remoting from the house until the order lifts — but being pretty much grounded for life, and her body language on the way home from the station, I know she’s sorry. And with everything we’ve gleaned from her about that dipshit Soos, she’s only primed to have her heart broken on top of everything — I see no point in making things worse by continuing to punish her for things she clearly feels more than enough compunction over. She’s been punished enough.

And gazing at her, I can’t help but feel a fond, almost nostalgic amusement — although her posture is remorseful where mine had been defiant, her expression full of self-condemnation where mine was righteous, she reminds me _so_ much of myself at her age. I can’t even say how many times I sat sullen and challenging across the dining table at Wayne Manor from Bruce, guilty of similar transgressions.

“I know you are, _mija,”_ I tell her gently. “Look, do you want some hot chocolate or something?”

She looks quizzically at me.

“Well, we’ve still got a bit of a talk ahead of us, it’s colder than _una teta de bruja —_ ” I’m vindicated when Dita snickers, “it’s too late for any more coffee… and let’s be real, it’s been a pretty crappy night. Might as well get cozy.” 

“Okay,” she says. 

I study her, noting her tense posture, how tightly she holds herself. She’s covered in bruises and scrapes, the bottom of her chin had to get stitched up, and not to mention, she _really_ had an encounter with Godfather Death. I sigh, and approach her chair. I give her hair a little tug, and squeeze her shoulder. 

“I’m sorry, Dad,” she repeats. “I didn’t mean for any of what happened, I just —”

“I know,” I tell her. “Look, it’s okay. I need you to know before we even get started that it’s okay. You’re forgiven for what happened, we just need to discuss it from a parent-child perspective without a bunch of cops and detectives and doctors running around.”

She inclines her head.

I chuckle. “Girl, I grew up with Bruce freaking Wayne. You think I didn’t do my fair share of sneaking out?”

She snorts a little. “Pff. Yeah, right.”

“God’s honest truth,” I say, moving now to prep the chocolate while she sits back down. “Ask your Uncle Jay — he’ll tell you I was out of the house sub-rosa at _least_ two or three nights a week. I was young once, too, you know.”

She laughs a little. “You’re _still_ pretty young.”

I roll my eyes. “I wish. I’m over the hill and believe me when I say I _feel_ it. Anyway, just because I’m a decrepit old guy now doesn’t mean I didn’t entertain plenty of teenaged wickedness back in my day.”

“Like what, tabletop campaigning or LAN parties?”

I grin at Dita over my shoulder, appreciating her humor. “More like… sneaking out to go meet up with my then girlfriend.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Mm-hmm. And like I said, teenaged wickedness. I’m just fortunate her dad didn’t send me straight to the ground or turn me into a frog or something.”

“Who was she?” Lourdes asks, her shoulders visibly loosening now.

“You’re actually going to meet her this weekend when the godkids come over. Her name is Zatanna — and you’ll _love_ her, by the way, she’s wonderful.”

“Wait, _the_ Zatanna?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “I knew her through the circus. She and her dad would perform with Haly’s now and then. She still does, actually.”

“Wow.” She pauses. “Hence, you might actually have been turned into a frog.”

“Yep,” I tell her. “She’s Iris and Isa’s godmother, incidentally.”

Finishing the hot chocolate, I bring it over, and place a cup in front of her while I have a seat. “So… long and short of my bringing all that up, I can’t really get on you too hard for sneaking out when I, quite frankly, did the same thing all the time.” 

She fiddles with her mug, and nods. 

“But this doesn’t mean you’re off the hook,” I continue. “This is some pretty serious stuff, Dita. I know you might not have thought so when you went creeping out of the house, but it _is_ — and it goes deeper than you might realize.”

She sighs, staring at her hot chocolate. “Is… Soos in trouble?”

I gaze at her. “Well, I’m not going to lie to you. As it stands right now, yes. He very well might be in a _lot_ of trouble. It’s not _forensic_ yet, but there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that we can’t ignore. Did Soos ever tell you what those notes he had you dropping off in California to people were?”

She shakes her head. 

“Well, I’m guessing they weren’t love letters,” I say. “Or even invoices, or nice, kindly payment reminders… They might have been something a _lot_ darker. And not even remotely related to Drake’s Gym — it’s not like that crap isn’t all handled at the desk or online, anyway, Lourdes.” I drum the table. “You said Falcone’s thugs called you a minnow?”

She nods, looking miserable. 

I sigh, and leaning my elbows on the table, press my hands into my head.

“Okay, listen —” I say, looking up at her, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Carmine Falcone, it’s that he’s _not_ stupid. He’s not careless. He’s _never_ reckless. This guy is nothing if not completely thorough — he does his homework before he organizes a move, and makes _absolutely certain_ he has the right people before he acts on that move. Meaning he had a reason to target you tonight, and considering that your social life is pretty limited to a couple of kids at St. Ignatius and your family at the moment here in Blüdhaven, the one common denominator between you and Carmine Falcone is Santiago Navarro.”

“They kept bringing up Tiger Shark,” Dita says. “That pirate guy? I hadn’t really heard much about him prior, but now I think about it, I kind of remember seeing something about him on the news here and there.”

“That’s right,” I tell her. “And he’s been making some moves here in New Jersey, one of them _extremely_ serious. I know you heard about it — I’m not about to go into more detail and wreck that hot chocolate for you.”

“Yeah,” she says. “...It’s so sad.”

I nod, and sigh. “It is.” I'm quiet a moment. “No one deserves that. I don’t care who they’re connected to or what they’ve done in their lives.”

She’s quiet, gazing at her cup. “Tiger Shark… isn’t _Soos_ , is he?”

“I’m not quite ready to say Soos is our Jack Sparrow,” I assure her. “But I can say with total confidence that Soos at least has some very close connection to him. Be it that he’s a high-level hitman or enforcer — I mean, he’s a pretty capable guy — or he’s his first mate, or his _accountant_ or whatever, there’s a tie, here. There’s enough circumstantial evidence we’ve actually got a warrant out for him to bring him in for questioning. It could all be coincidental, but… I sincerely doubt it.” I pause a moment. “I’ve had a long time to build up my instincts, and I’ve been through enough I’ve learned _not_ to ignore them.”

Lourdes folds her arms on the table, and lays her head on them. “...I’m so stupid.”

“Oh, honey, no, you’re not,” I tell her, resting a hand on her arm. She turns her head to look at me. “You’re young, that’s all. And you’ve been in an emotionally vulnerable position for a long time — being separated from your mother from birth is going to take its toll on anyone, and when you factor how your aunt treated you into it, then the fact that you lost them both within months of each other… Lourdes, assholes like Santiago _look_ for people like you to take advantage of. It’s not at all that you’re stupid — it’s that he’s _good_ at what he does. He can spot a target that he can home in on from miles off. I’m just glad he slipped up and got sloppy or cocky enough we could smell what he was stepping in.”

“I probably should have known something was up, though,” she sighs. “You’re right, payments and reminders are handled online or at the desk or snail mail. I just thought…” She sits up, and leans back in her seat. “...He’s always been so important to me, Dad.”

I nod. “I know he has been. Listen… not everyone is all bad or does all bad. I mean, Ted Bundy volunteered for suicide hotlines. Soos was at least there for you in a way that you needed for a time, even if it wasn’t totally genuine.”

“What if he’s not guilty?” she asks imploringly.

“Then he’s not guilty of what we just spelled out — but he’s still a dickwad,” I say. “I’m totally gonna pop that kid in the wiener when I see him next.”

She laughs a bit. “If he’s not guilty of the other stuff, then I’ll let you do that because he left me to walk home by myself like a consummate jerk.”

“And if he _is_ guilty,” I say, “I’m going to tell you here and now he messed with the wrong chick.”

She smiles. “Because I’m my father’s daughter?”

“And _no one_ messes with your dad,” I say, squeezing her arm. 

There’s a moment of quiet.

“Dita,” I say eventually.

She looks at me.

“I do need you to know something,” I say. “You scared the _hell_ out of me tonight, not to mention Barbara. You’ll be having a conversation with her in the morning. And I’m exceptionally disappointed that you lied to Jason, too. We’re all just lucky that the situation came to light in time for someone to pull you out of that mess. Not saying you couldn’t and didn’t handle yourself, but this whole thing could have ended up _so much worse_.”

Again, she hugs herself. “I know,” she murmurs. “I’m sorry.”

“And now that I’ve done the obligatory dad thing and said all that,” I say, standing, “come over here and give me a hug. Because mostly… I’m just _so_ glad you’re okay.”

She stands, and readily walks to me. I wrap her up close, and just pray she doesn’t notice that my eyes are burning, trailing a handful of tears into her hair.

I take a breath, steadying myself, then make my _Lifetime_ movie debut and say, “Just when I’ve found you… God, I can’t _bear_ to think of losing you.”

She hugs me tighter. “Thank you, Dad.”

I nod. “Of course, _mija.”_

The hug goes on quite a bit longer, her leftover shaking quieting in time. She eventually draws back.

“Can I go to bed now?” she asks. 

I chuckle. “Of course. Go get some rest — you need it. No training tomorrow, you’ve had a rough time tonight and I’d rather you recover.”

She nods. “I can get down with that. I might just sleep for a week.”

I smile. “Night, _cariño.”_

“Night, Dad.”

She heads upstairs, and I sit down at the table for a long, long time, just thinking, before I finally head upstairs to bed myself. 

  
  


********

  
  


_Three Nights Later_

  
  


Buzzing with excitement, I huddle in the shadows by the back porch, effectively camouflaged in the darkness from sight. I pull up my holographic computer, shielding it with my body, and send a message to Gannon and Amy’s private group contact.

 _Got him, together with RH and RR,_ I send. _Not TS, but SN. He’s staying in a boarding house normally meant for female wrestlers that are attending a training camp toward Nationals. Working independently as a commissioned trainer. Going under a pseudonym, “Alexander Morales,” and with a falsified ID. TS has publicly been on down low, Falcone the same, although the heat is going to be brought on ASAP. Intel offers that there’s a lot of scheming on both ends. Organize pick-up for SN/AM first thing tomorrow morning._

A moment later, and my computer pings. 

_Roger, Nightwing. Thanks for the heads-up,_ I get from Amy.

 _Heck, yeah. Tomorrow morning we START this party,_ Gannon sends following. 

Satisfied, all too ready to get Soos in the interrogation room, I make my way to the hidden door that lines the side of the house under the back deck. It’s sheltered under an overgrowth of weeds and paneling beneath, the holographic security box only accessed by either my computer or Barb’s. I enter the code, push the wilted, half-frozen leaves out of the way, and head into where the door drops me into the little alcove in the basement. This room, the war room, as Babs and I have not-so-cleverly nicknamed it, is equally hidden from view, a walled in section of the storage room that houses Babs’ and my workstations and equipment. No one would know, entering the storage room, that this room was constructed within it — we ensured the walls chameleoned with their partners, and the “door” is just a swinging block that blends into the concrete around it, accessed in one of two ways — either in the same remote manner as the outside door, or by tapping the top right corner twice in the event of loss of power or connection. Only a light dent in the concrete, borderline imperceptible to the untrained eye, indicates the exact spot to tap.

Straightening after landing, about to make my way to my workstation to start documenting, I about go flying through the ceiling.

 _Lourdes_ is sitting there, in my chair at my stationary work PC, a Birdarang clutched like a holy chalice in her hand. She looks as though she’s been sitting here for quite a while, going by the distribution of her weight in the chair. I stare, scarcely capable of even assimilating what I’m looking at right now. I feel, if anything, like I’m suddenly launched into the body of some kid caught vandalizing a school under Lourdes’ triumphant stare.

“I _knew_ it,” she crows victoriously, “I just _knew_ it!”

I promptly deflate and wonder _now_ what the hell I’m supposed to do.


	10. Spiderpig, Spiderpig

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, everyone!!
> 
> Many thanks and ALL my love to aj_mccleod... legit the best person and beta ever~ Thanks for being you, dearest!
> 
> Happy reading and love to all!
> 
> Xoxoxoxoxoxo,  
> EF <3

**CHAPTER 10: Spiderpig, Spiderpig**

  
  


_Dick_

  
  


I sink into a seat, and heave a sigh, all the wind expelled from my sails at once.

“Welp,” I state, throwing my hands up, “I’m outed. How in the _heck_ did you figure out how to get in here?”

“Um. I followed you, actually,” Lourdes says, and flushes in the light from the computer screen next to her. “I just — I don’t know, I had a hunch about this, and I wasn’t going to be able to relax until I confirmed it.”

“And you _followed_ me?” I ask, incredulous.

“Well, yes,” she says. “I mean… you never thought to look behind the furnace?”

I stare, bollixed. Good Lord. How _obvious_. For all I’ve dealt with teenage kids for most of my life, I apparently don’t know what to actually _do_ with one — least of all my own. 

Which… actually might explain how she was able to uncover this little aspect of my life. Once again, like father, like daughter. At this revelation, I can’t help it — I start laughing.

Dita looks at me quizzically, then starts up a little chuckle of her own when I find I can’t stop the outflow of mirth that soon has my eyes streaming.

“Um,” she says after a moment, when I’ve calmed down enough to take a breath. “You’re not, like… mad or anything?”

I shake my head. “No, no, not mad. Not thrilled, granted, but not mad, either. This isn’t really something you can keep from family members for long, so…” I let go another sigh. “Do I wish you’d found out this way? No. Did I intend to tell you at some point in the future? Yes. I guess… you just kind of expedited that.”

She’s just gazing at me, wide-eyed, borderline _starry_. 

“What?” I ask with a smile.

“Just — holy _shit,_ Dad!” she says. “I can’t believe this — well. I mean. I guess I _can,_ getting to know you like I have, but —” She grins fit to crack her face open. “You’re the First Hero to Blüdhaven, the first Robin — you know _Batman!_ And Tigress, and Miss Martian, and Batgirl, and Spoiler, and Flash, and ohmigod, Superman and Wonder Woman and Aquaman — like, the whole Justice League and Young Justice —”

She’s jumped out of her seat now, gushing like a teenybopper, her blue eyes sparkling with excitement in the monitor light. It hits me that she _is_ still fifteen, despite her being remarkably mature for her age. Occasionally, I feel like I’m communicating with an adult when talking to her. Moments like these, where she reveals she’s still a kid under it all, only endear me to my daughter all the more. 

“Okay, first of all, don’t swear,” I admonish her with a grin, and she promptly apologizes and sits back down, “and second of all, yes to all of the above. Trust me, though, it’s not _nearly_ as flashy as what it sounds like. Mostly it’s a lot of stress and headaches and early aging and whopping medical bills.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” Lourdes says with a laugh. “You’re a _hero_ , Dad — I mean… that’s so _cool.”_

I laugh. “Well, I appreciate you saying that, Dita, thank you. But I don’t know, _hero_ is kind of a generous term. Between you and me, there’s a lot of things I’d do differently if given the chance.” I straighten in my seat, and sober. Now the excitement has had its moment in the limelight, it's time for some Real Talk. “Listen, though, kiddo — on to Serioustown. Now you know, you _do_ understand how delicate this information is — at least, I hope?”

She nods. “I think so.”

“You cannot tell _anyone,_ Lourdes. No one. Absolutely not a single soul. You can’t tell friends, you can’t tell boyfriends, you can’t tell teachers, I wouldn’t even tell a civilian counselor. Do you understand?”

Again, she nods. I gaze at her for a moment.

“I’m going to share something with you, here,” I say, resting my elbows on my knees. “When I say you have to keep it under wraps, I _mean_ it. The last time my identity was compromised, _hundreds_ of people died — a lot of those just by having unfortunate proximity to me. This is serious stuff — it’s not sleepover gossip, and it’s _not_ a bragging right. Okay? I need you to be safe, and I need the rest of my family and friends to be safe, and I need bystanders who just happen to be close by to be safe — you get it. You _can’t_ say anything. To anyone.”

“I understand, Dad,” she tells me solemnly, then raises her right hand. “I, Lourdes Maria Rodriguez-Ayala, hereby swear to absolute secrecy.”

I smile. “I'm going to hold you to that, _mija._ Like I said, this is serious stuff.”

She nods. “I get it. Definitely keep it under wraps. Not even hot oil or the rack should be able to get it out of me. I’m… assuming _family_ knows, though, right?”

I feel a smile quirk my lips. “Uh… yeah… about that.”

She leans toward me. “Wait. No way. Who?”

“Well, Babs was the first Batgirl. Now Oracle.”

“Oh, my _God,_ no way!”

I grin. “Way.”

“Who else?” Dita leans in even closer, as though we’re a pair of pals at a slumber party sharing secrets. Speaking of sleepover gossip.

“Well. Pop-pop is none other than Batman,” I tell her.

“Oh, no freaking way,” she says, her eyes dinner plate huge in her face. 

“Again, way. Uncle Jay is Red Hood, Uncle Tim is Red Robin, Aunt Cass is Batgirl —”

“I have to go pass out now,” she says. “Hold on, fainting in three, two, one…”

She mockingly sways in her chair, and I faux-catch her. She straightens up, giggling. 

“So, wait a tick,” she says, brushing her hair over her shoulder. “Red Hood is kind of… I mean, he…” 

“Likes to play Fast-and-Loose?”

“Yeah. I mean… isn’t he technically considered a crime lord by some? How in the name of all things holy did he end up with Gannon — a _cop?”_

“I hooked them up, actually,” I say proudly. “Anyway… I don’t know if I’d call Jason a crime lord. I’d say he’s… more like Frank Castle, maybe? Kind of has a Punisher or _Death Wish_ method of going about doing things.” I push my hair off my forehead. It occurs to me that neither my daughter nor I have hair that behaves. “We’ve all just reached something of an agreement with Jay that if he keeps his work close to the vest, assists us when we need it, and doesn’t let it come into Blüdhaven jurisdiction, we’ll turn something of a blind eye. He’s cooled his jets a bit in recent years, anyway, so it’s a pretty peaceable agreement that’s worked out for the most part.” I pause. “Listen, though — I can’t condone a lot of what he gets up to, so if you think you’re going to do a job shadow with him at any time in the future, you can forget it right now.”

She shakes her head. “You’re safe there. I don’t think I have the stomach for _that_ type of vigilantism, Dad.” She purses her lips, even as a warm feeling comes over me. “...It’s going to be so hard to reconcile Uncle Jason with the Red Hood.”

“Jay has a good heart, Dita,” I tell her. “Everything he does… it’s _never_ from a place of malice or evil intent. I know that sounds weird, but…”

“No,” she says, smiling. “But hey — about job shadowing…”

I sit back and groan. “Are you going to ask if you can shadow me sometime?”

She bounces in her seat and clasps her hands in the prayer gesture. “Please, please, please…?”

I laugh. “Lourdes —”

“Please, Dad!”

“Those freaks from the Falcone circuit didn’t put the fear of God in you?”

“Actually, that’s _why_ I want to join you — I don’t want girls who don’t have Nightwing Dad to come help them or years of training to give them a leg-up on jerks like Falcone’s people.”

I soften. “Well, whether I like it or not… I do believe you are a little Leaguer in the making, my child.”

“So… _can_ I shadow you sometime?”

I sigh. “I’m going to hold my nose and say this — _maybe._ But _after_ protective custody lifts.”

She squeals and leaps out of her seat to hug me about the shoulders. 

“I said _maybe,”_ I say, although I hug her back. 

“Still, that means you’ll consider it!” she says joyfully. “Besides, if you change your mind, I’ll start bugging Pop-pop.”

“Don’t you dare,” I laugh. “And not because I don’t approve of any crime-fighting endeavors from you, but because you know not what you ask with that one, _princesa.”_

“But you’ll at least think about it?”

I smile. “That much I can promise. But look — even a shadow is going to require a lot of training if I’m going to feel it’s safe to bring you along, and that training is going to be pretty different than what you’re used to.”

She picks up the Birdarang she’d previously held. “Meaning I get to play with some of these?”

“Potentially,” I say. 

“Oh, _cool,”_ she gushes, then lowers the weapon. “Say... Dad?”

“Hmm?”

She looks as though she's thinking hard about something, poised to speak at any moment. She takes a breath, pauses, lets it go, draws in another.

“What is it?” I prod.

“Umm,” she says. “You know what, never mind.”

“No, honey, what is it?” I ask, angling toward her a bit.

“Just...” She purses her lips a bit, apparently thinking. “Did my mom know? About this?”

I half-smile, a small instant of surprise moving through me when I find that as I speak, I don't mind talking about Catalina for the first time since I can even remember. “She did. She was the Tarantula, you know — I trained her for a time.”

“Oh, wow,” Lourdes says. “Really? That's something... I never knew about her.”

“It's in your blood, _mija,”_ I tell her, squeezing her wrist. “Probably should've known I couldn't keep you from this for long. So I'll tell you what,” I stand up, “first things first. How about we let Babs in on this development, and start training tout-suite?”

“Like… tout-suite as in right now?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, I am _so_ in!” she shouts with glee, and follows me as we leave the not-so-secret center of operations. 

  
  


********

  
  


Peering into the interrogation room at the station, I cross my arms, considering what’s laid in front of me.

“There’s your white whale, Grayson,” Amy says, looking past me at where Soos sits at the metal table, his face an impassive mask. “Normally I'd consider you too close to this case to be working it, but I'm going to leave it with you because I trust you. I hope you recognize what that means for me.”

“Yeah,” I tell her, smiling. “Thanks, Amy. Gannon will be there, too, anyway, so if I get a little too up in this case's grill, he'll be able to keep it together.”

“Got anything else on Navarro? From your source?”

“A bit,” I say, “but not much. Hopefully we’ll learn a little more and clinch things here in a few.”

Gannon enters the vestibule, and I nod to him.

“Ready?” I ask. 

“Born ready, partner,” he says. “Saddle up.”

“Now, what would Jason say?” I chuckle as we make our way to the interrogation room.

When we enter, Soos gives me an incredulous look.

“Oh, you’ve gotta be _kidding,”_ he says.

“Nope,” I tell him, slamming the necessary evidence files down on the table. “It’s you and me — oh, and Uncle Gan over there today. So.” I sit down, fold my hands, and smile pleasantly. “What’s doing, Captain Jack?”

He lifts his eyebrows. “What?”

“I wouldn’t advise playing dumb,” Gannon says, sitting down next to me, holding his tie to his chest. “When we go through this file, you’ll understand why.”

“I’m not going to jerk you around, here, Mr. Navarro,” I say. “Would you like to wait for a lawyer before we get started? You know you have the right to one, so we’ll gladly give you a few to call one up.”

“No, thanks,” Soos says. “Five minutes and I’ll be out of here, anyway.”

“Okay, no lawyer. Well, no problem — although, I have to tell you, that probably wasn’t wise. We know you’re connected to Tiger Shark — if you’re not him yourself. We also know you’ve got a habit of enlisting teenagers to do some highly illegal errands for you. What were those notes you had Lourdes Ayala dropping off to people — death threats? Psychological warfare? At the very least, I’d call those messages felony menacing.” I produce a copy of one of the notes in question, and lay it in front of him. “And the fact that you solicited an unknowing minor to drop those off for you…” I tsk. “Not cool, sir. Not cool at all.”

“Where’s your proof?” he asks. “Your daughter? She never looked at the notes I gave her to drop off. You can’t prove that I wrote that note, or that it was one of the ones Lourdes dropped off to clients for me.” 

“Well,” I say, “we have a handwriting specialist on our investigation team who determined pretty definitively that the note I just showed you was written by none other than you.”

He snorts. “They’re not the most reliable witnesses, last I checked.”

“No, but distinctive handwriting is a pretty decent witness,” I state. “Check it out — you always write your R’s in caps, right? That’s a fairly unique habit.” I let my smile widen. “Thanks for all those notes you scribbled longhand at Drake’s, by the way. They were very helpful.”

“How’d you even get your hands on those?” he asks. “Doubt it was remotely legal.”

“Oh, nah, it was perfectly legal. We just got a basic warrant to search the premises for any possible evidence as related to a crime we were investigating. I’ve got a copy of it right here, if you want to see. Your manager, unlike you, was very cooperative. Also, Lourdes handed me a couple of the little flirty notes you’d been sending her since she moved — definitely the same handwriting as on those aforementioned not-so-nice notes.” 

“The other thing, too, is you don’t really have any alibis for… well, any number of Tiger Shark-related misdeeds,” Gannon adds. “Such as a very recent murder that was tied to the guy, an innocent lady named Liza was the victim, I believe —”

“The hell?” Soos says, glaring now.

“The hell, what?” Gannon asks.

“What made you even look into my whereabouts or whatever on the night of some murder? Like, what do _I_ need an alibi for in correlation with any of this?”

“Well, there are some circumstantial ties, is all — like the notes were given to people affiliated with Tiger Shark’s enemies in California. The notes in _your_ handwriting, that were delivered by a fifteen-year-old girl. Then you leave California… things on the Tiger Shark front quiet down out there… things on the Tiger Shark front out here start picking up... and then a woman with non-nefarious connections to a mob family — a mob family that’s got some territorial clout and wouldn’t like to share space with some newcomer pirate who’s done business with their enemy Black Mask in the recent past — turns up murdered. I just looked through my list of new kids on the block and couldn’t help but notice the timing and common locations, is all.”

“And how the fuck did _you_ fuzz have any idea about this murder? Last I checked, mobsters have pocket cops who handle their whale removal and investigative shit and keep you shirt-and-tie assholes out of it.” He smirks. “Unless _you’re_ on their payroll.”

 _Bingo._ I bite back a smile.

“Phew. Kiss your mother with that mouth?” I ask, gearing up.

“Or Grayson’s underage daughter?” Gannon adds.

“My client is none of your business, _Uncle Gannon,”_ Soos growls. “Just like that Liza lady and the whale whose mouth she turned up in aren’t mine.”

Before he can protest, I go on to say, “We never said anything about whales or whale removal. How’d you know Liza was found in the body of a whale?”

A flicker in Soos’ eyes. “I heard about it.”

“From who?” I ask. “This isn’t exactly info that was released to the public. Or the press. Or anyone affiliated with the press. Or anyone affiliated with the public.”

“Didn’t they have to haul that whale carcass out of where it was found? Tends to draw some curiosity,” Soos says. “Maybe that’s how I heard about it.”

I check the records I have in my file, for show more than anything. “They did, but… from what I understand, the whale was dropped in one of Falcone’s commercial offices on the waterfront. Disposal was taken care of without even having to bring the carcass onto any main streets—” I pause for dramatic effect, “in Gotham.” I lean toward him, noticing a tightening in Santiago’s jaw. “So… how did you know about that detail, that Liza Romanelli was murdered and stuffed in the equally murdered body of Shamu? Because you’re right about one thing… mob murders are usually kept pretty close to the vest. Pretty sure that even if anybody saw that dead whale, no one on the street would be any the wiser as to why it was getting carted past them.”

There’s a long pause, and Soos sits back, crossing his arms.

“I have no interest in talking to you fuckers again,” he says, “without a lawyer present.”

“Probably the smartest thing you’ve said all day, pal,” I tell him. “Although… five minutes and you’re out of here was an accurate guess. Except you’re not going back to your little pad with the wrestling team to groom future helpers, Alexander Morales, Santiago Navarro, possibly Tiger Shark — you’re going to go into holding until trial.”

“You can’t do that,” Soos says. 

“Actually, we can,” Gannon says. “It’s been signed off on by the DA already.”

I stand aside once Amy releases the Kraken — aka the corrections officers that have been waiting by the door for the outcome of this questioning — on Soos. He moves to resist, at which point I _happily_ come along to lend a hand. 

There’s no secret the guy’s capable — he’s quick and strong, not to mention young and extremely spry. It takes a few seconds, a couple of which I wonder if I’ll even be able to wrangle this guy in my stiff dress clothes, not to mention while taking and ducking strikes, but eventually Soos is facedown on the interrogation table. My weight and my very large compatriot’s from corrections thankfully keep him there for just long enough for the other officer to get the cuffs on Soos’ wrists.

“All right, big guy,” Ben, the first corrections officer, says, “got some extra charges on ya for court now. Thanks kindly.” 

I take a breath, and straighten my tie James Bond style while Ben leads Soos to the door. 

“Yeah, don’t think this is over, Grayson,” Soos says, eyeing me with enough flint to start a fire as he's led away. 

“That a threat or a promise?” I ask cordially as Ben takes him out of the room.

Second meeting with The (Not) Boyfriend went _much_ better than the first, if you ask me.

After Gannon and I enter the vestibule, Amy approaches us.

“Well, that’s that and all about it for now,” she says. “Wish we had better ties or a confession, but we at least have enough to keep him in the pen for a while.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “We’ll have to connect the dots on our own before his trial. Hopefully we’ll get the requisite amount of info to confirm his role in Tiger Shark’s grand American pirate story and land him in Belle Reve.” I sigh. “Pretty sure Lockhaven won’t hold him for long...”

“Amen,” Gannon agrees. “Best we can do for now, though.”

“Yeah.” I clap and squeeze his shoulder. “Good work, mate.”

He grins at me. “Yep. Good work.”

  
  


********

  
  


Coming off training with Lourdes in the morning had me tired even before work started — and now here I am, scoping the docks in near total darkness, ready to undergo a drug bust at the waterfront after a long-ass day of paperwork and gumshoeing. Dita is an electric ball of energy, always go-go-go from the moment she rises to the time she passes out at night. Most of the time, we can’t even get her to sit still long enough to eat.

“God, Dick, she’s _such_ a mini-you,” Barbara laughed this morning, watching as Dita crammed the remainder of a piece of toast and bacon into her mouth and sprinted up the stairs after two solid hours of working with her in techniques meant to combat a group. “Didn’t you tell me your dad used to say the only solution for you was a leash?”

I chuckled, and worked out a kink in my back. Not only is Dita lively at all hours, she’s a _beast —_ a heavy-handed striker and effective body-slammer. Fast, too — she won’t have any problem when she fights her opponent in a couple of weeks. “He did, and I’m thinking Lourdes is officially my parents’ revenge on me for never giving them a moment’s peace.”

Ten minutes later, before I was even done with my cup of coffee, Lourdes came thundering back down the stairs, her hair wet from her shower, her eyes bright and cheeks rosy. She grabbed her school bag from the office, rushed to me to give me a hug and kiss goodbye, said, “Gotta hurry up, ’bye, Dad,” and launched over to the kitchen table to get started on her remote schooling. 

“And off I go,” I laughed, giving Babs a kiss to head out.

Fifteen minutes before my shift was set to end, Amy called the whole department into the bull pen — a tip from an anonymous informant told us Black Mask was transferring goods (aka, drugs and other contraband) to Tiger Shark’s affiliates in an hour down by the docks. Teams were promptly assembled, with Gannon and me heading them up. I’m determined to keep an eye out for any potential Tiger Sharks — anything to confirm that Soos is, or isn’t, my guy.

I know this whole thing has been hard on Lourdes, losing her former trainer, and really, close friend and mentor (appropriate or not), so abruptly and in such an unexpected, severe way. As is her wont, though, she’s not spoken much about him or the situation since he was jailed last week. All she’s really said is that she’s sorry about the position it’s landed _me_ in, and other than that, nada.

She hasn’t spoken much about her mother, either, nor about her aunt. I’ve considered asking Dinah if she’ll talk with her sometime, as a counselor rather than as her trainer. It hasn't been hard to pick up on the fact that Lourdes was encouraged from a young age not to cry, not to express her emotions — pretty much never to do anything other than put up a strong front and exhibit zero “weakness.” I want _so much_ for my daughter to understand that it’s _all right_ to emote, even when those feelings aren’t all rainbows, strength, and sunshine, but I worry that my encouragement alone won’t be sufficient. Hopefully Dinah can help her start wrangling those feelings and expressing them in a healthy way, rather than apparently suppressing them as she has, along with her heartening and growing relationship with Barbara.

Well, can’t worry about that right now. The game is afoot — and I need to keep my head in it.

In an altered Weaver stance, one hand grasping the handle of my department-issued revolver and the other my flashlight, I step carefully around the corner of a weatherbeaten boathouse, peeling an eye for movement on the water, keeping my back to the wall. Around me, fanning out, teammates and squad members move forward down the steps and escarpments that line the shore, slowly making their way toward the waterfront. I motion for one group to move left, the other right, while I shift toward the dock alongside a tethered schooner that bobs in the current. Gannon draws up some way off to my left, just behind me.

So far, nothing doing — no activity reported or spotted. The info could have been a dud, even a ruse, but we’ve ensured those bases are covered in either case. More teams are scoping other parts of the city that intel has suggested might see some organized crime-related action in the event that this is a red herring or lure.

Motion flits in my line of sight, from a speedboat tied to the dock to my right, just beyond the one I’m standing on. A cover is over its top, but there’s no missing its breaking away from the post. I shine my light in its direction, the barrel of the revolver just over the torch. 

The sound of the engine blares into the night, and my reflexes come alive in an instant. I step all the way past the schooner to the edge of the dock. 

“Police!” I shout, primed and ready to fire warning shots into the water if whoever's navigating this covered boat isn't on the up-and-up.

Before I can say or do anything else, a _thunk_ strikes me in the left side, sending me to my right hip on the dock, almost into the water. I look up, confused, and hear the sound of a second speedboat blasting into life from somewhere off in the distance. I try to sit up and find that I can’t.

My ears start ringing, an abrupt tinny sound drowning out the din of shouts, gunfire, motors, and splashing around me. I attempt to sit up again. My limbs don’t respond. I have an odd instinct that I'm hurt somewhere — although I can't say for sure what's just happened.

I hear Gannon’s voice, feel him pulling me from my side to my back, and then zoom — right out of that curious sort of life, it’s straight down a long, black rabbit hole I go.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I feel compelled to assure everyone that Dick will be okay~) <3


	11. Do Not Pass Go

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, everyone! <3
> 
> Hope everything's good for y'all! <3 Just going to take a moment to thank aj_mccleod for being such a wonderful human and beta reader. You're the best, love!
> 
> Happy reading, my dears! <3 ^_^
> 
> Xoxoxoxoxoxoxo,  
> EF

**CHAPTER 11: “Do Not Pass Go”**

  
  


_Lourdes_

  
  


I clasp my arms tightly around myself, my hands digging hard into my biceps. I don’t move except to breathe, focusing hard on the design in the musty carpeting that spreads across the floor of RABE’s waiting room. Babs sits down beside me after dropping paperwork off at the front vestibule, her posture equally tense.

“Did they say anything?” I ask.

She shakes her head, and I’m floored by how utterly _pale_ she looks in the fluorescent overhead lighting. Her skin is bloodless, her eyes glassy, her lips a taut line in the otherwise calm mask of her face.

“No news yet,” she says, her voice tight and forced. “Just that he’s in surgery, but they couldn’t tell me what it was…” She closes her eyes, and passes a hand over her face, the first outward break in the stoic facade she’s kept up so far. She keeps her palm against her cheekbone, her fingers grinding into her temple. “Gannon’s still giving his report, but he said he’ll get here as soon as he can.” She sighs. “And since he’s in the middle of that… it’s not like he has time to text a lot of detail. And reports can take anywhere from five minutes to five hours.” She lowers her hand, and lets another breath go through her nostrils.

I turn my gaze back to the floor.

Shot during a drug bust.

 _Que demonios._ How did it even _happen?_ I’ve seen my father move in sparring, training, and combat alike — he’s deadly fast, his instincts and reflexes practically supernatural. How could some dumb _junkie_ land a hit on him? And in the side, where his vest didn’t protect him? No moron is ever that lucky — _none_ of this makes sense.

I hug myself tighter, unable to even _breathe_ now, only drawing in and releasing breaths when my body forcibly reminds me it needs air before I asphyxiate.

The news transitions over to some late comedy on the television that hangs a way off. I barely hear it, its sounds getting lost in my ears before registering in my brain. My stomach growls, twisting and turning verbosely, but I don’t notice my hunger beyond dim, far-off pangs.

For whatever reason, I can’t stop dwelling on the morning that Dad and I went to Bernie’s after we trained, before I had to head to school. It wasn’t anything necessarily _special —_ there was no occasion, nothing of particular import going on that day, but that pre-dawn visit to our collective favorite cafe is sticking in my mind right now, and it refuses to unstick itself, as though it’s glued to my brain and there’s no peeling it off.

“Hmm,” I had said, studying the menu from where I sat across from Dad in the little retro booth. “Custard pancakes or stuffed French toast…” 

“Custard pancakes, duh,” he said. “I mean, there’s not even any waffling on that one.”

I stared, then slumped in horror. I couldn’t help laughing even as I groaned, “Ohmigod, Dad…”

“What?” he asked with that disarming grin of his. “Don’t be all flipped like pancakes, Dita. Be like _syrup._ Go with the flow.”

“It’s official,” I stated. “You’re giving me the crepes.”

He lifted his coffee. “Why? What’s Sumatra with you?”

“I’ve bean playing the Game of Scones,” I said, dragging the appetizer plate of blueberry mini scones toward me. “Breakfast is coming…”

“And here I thought it was because you’d been brewing up a life so French, you were eating _pain_ for breakfast,” he said.

“We’re really on a roll, here,” I said.

He laughed, then reached across the table to nudge my cheek a little. “In case anyone ever doubted we were related… Several bad puns later.”

That stupid conversation just keeps going through my head, along with other young memories. His big, strong, my-dad-will-turn-your-dad-into-a-greasy-smear arms holding me to him before grappling to the rooftop. The kind, inviting way he asked if I wanted to talk about Soos when the truth about my old trainer, formerly the person I trusted the most implicitly in this world, came out. I grit my teeth, thinking on how Dad inclined his head after he told me Soos was in jail now for some of the most awful, disgusting crimes I’d ever heard of. My father hadn’t stepped closer to me or invaded my space, seeming to sense the confusion and tension that drew up a big vanguard around me like a Colonial fort. He had simply held my gaze, his body language simultaneously open, protective, and soothing, his voice gentle and warm as he spoke. 

I had shaken my head. “No. I don’t — I don’t really need to or anything. Uh… thanks, though.”

“You sure?” he’d asked.

He didn’t ask this question dismissively or as though trying to avoid giving away the fact that he was accepting an out from having an uncomfortable, emotional talk. Rather, he sounded probing, doubtful — as though he sensed that there was a part of me that in fact _desperately_ wanted to talk about everything Soos-related until I had no words or even voice left, that just wanted to cry all the fluid out of my body over how much that asshole had hurt me, using and endangering and lying to me the way he did. I hadn’t texted Alma in days at that point, and kept it to things unrelated with Cerdo. I couldn’t help feeling that Dad somehow was _picking up_ on those powerfully hidden sides of me, the ones that neither Constanza nor Soos would ever suffer to witness, the ones that I had come to label over the years of my life as particularly dangerous territory. It was in my father’s eyes, that knowing, comprehending light beneath his knitted brows. 

I nodded. Dad did the same, then reached out, and pulled me to him in one of his (amazing) hugs. 

“I’m sorry, _mija,”_ he murmured.

I just shook my head. “He was a jerk. I just… don’t want to talk about it.”

He nodded. “That’s all right, _cariño._ You don’t have to.”

Something about those words shook something loose in me, and I just closed my eyes against his chest, feeling, for the first time since I was born, _safe,_ and really, truly accepted without any strings. There were no tears, no words — but I knew, innately, that even if there were, my dad wouldn’t _ever_ judge me for them or hold them against me.

Sitting by Babs in the waiting room, I speak, surprising even myself.

“It’s just like Mom,” I mutter into the unspeaking quiet between Barbara and me.

“What?” Barb asks, seeming to come back to the here-and-now from her own thoughts.

“This.” I gesture. “It’s just like Mom. Constanza. Just sitting here with no answers, waiting forever for one, then getting the worst one possible.”

“Oh, Dita, we won’t get the worst possible answer,” she says, laying a hand on my shoulder. “Your dad’s a tough cookie, and this isn’t his first rodeo. He’ll be fine.”

“Yeah,” I say. “They said my mom would be fine, too. That she was always depressed and moody and the weird stuff she said the last time I saw her didn’t mean anything.”

Barb just squeezes my shoulder to hear this.

It’s so strange, realizing I’ve only known my father for all of two months. And yet —

“What am I going to do if Dad dies?” I blurt out.

“Dita, your dad won’t —”

I cut her off. “Or maybe he’s already dead.”

The next thing I know, my throat implodes on itself like a black hole just made itself at home there, my eyes burn, and my chest rattles. My sight blurs, and in spite of everything I’ve ever been told about the evils of _crying_ the tears come spilling over my cheeks at a hundred miles an hour. My shoulders hitch as I try to hold them in, but I find I _can’t —_ not this time, and no matter what efforts I put into stopping myself.

“Oh, honey,” Barbara says, then she leans to me and wraps her arms around my shoulders. I go rigid in her hold, fighting to stop the tears, failing. “Listen to me, okay?” Barb continues. “Everything else about him aside — like the fact that I’ve seen the guy walk around with a gaping hole in his gut and work his beat like it was nothing with third degree burns all over his back — your dad is _not_ going to die, not now that you’re here. He’s _not_ going to let some meth head with a pea-shooter take you away from him when you’ve only just found each other. It might sound canned or cheesy, but I _know_ him, Lourdes. There’s no way in _hell_ he’s going anywhere. If there’s one thing he absolutely _is_ among all the other things people might say about him — it’s that he’s a fighter. He fought to come into this world, he fought to _stay_ in this world, and he’s going to fight again right now.”

“Babs, he didn’t just get some grease-down in a Shiatsu chair — he got _shot_ —” I sob, hiccupping stupidly.

“This isn’t the first time,” Barb tells me. “Listen, this guy has been shot, stabbed, beaten, tortured, burned to a crisp in a fire, fallen down five flights of stairs, gotten into it with enemies that aren’t even classified as human — this is _nothing_. He’ll put a Band-Aid on it and go back to work tomorrow, I’ll bet you a dozen donuts.”

I wipe at my eyes and nose, and just let Babs hug me. It’s an odd, odd, _odd_ feeling, but now I’m crying, I find I don’t _want_ to stop. Somehow, like accepting embraces from others, it doesn’t feel wrong or weak — it feels _better,_ if not _good_ , per se. I lean into Barbara, catching the familiar scent that follows her around (her lotion, maybe), and find that the warmth of her closeness and the nice smells she exudes bring with them a feeling of sanctuary, much like Dad’s little Dadisms do the same. It’s so weird that this can happen so fast, this feeling of complete acceptance and sense of home with people who as yet should still qualify as strangers to me. 

Short time or no, they’re anything but, and right now, I decide not to worry about or question it. I lean into Barbara, and we sit like this for a good, long while.

“Babs,” I say after a time, when the crying has slowed and I can find my voice again. 

“Hmm.”

“Who’s John?” I ask. “...I’ve heard you and Dad mention him to each other sometimes.”

Barbara straightens beside me and lets a breath go.

“John was our son,” she explains. “We lost him in a late stillbirth at thirty-two weeks.”

My stomach falls. I stare, having no words for a moment. Just like that, the tears come back. I reach over to Barbara, and hug her with all my strength. 

“I’m sorry, Barb,” I say, having little else in my vocab to express myself.

She hugs me tighter in response. 

“John would’ve been _so lucky,”_ I say. “To have parents like you. Some people would kill just for _average_ ones. He’d have hit the jackpot with you and Dad.”

“And you,” Babs tells me, and I get blubbering all over again, even worse this time. 

We keep hugging like this until the comedy transitions to an episodic crime drama and the weather outside shifts from quiet to loud and rainy. We’re still sitting like this when a doctor — identifiable by her coat, lanyard, and embroidered name tag — at last approaches us where we sit.

“Barbara?” she says kindly.

“Hey, Dr. Skagle,” Babs says, loosening her grip on me and straightening in her seat. “For once I can actually say long time, no see.”

Dr. Skagle chuckles. “Yeah, Dick’s been surprisingly absent lately — I was starting to worry something was wrong somewhere. Then this happened, and now I can rest assured he’s still kicking and being his usual self.”

“Yeah, guess he finally remembered to keep racking up those frequent flyer miles,” Babs says.

Skagle consults her clipboard. “So first things first, Dick didn’t exactly go on a stroll through Disney World — the bullet entered his left side, tumbled, ruptured his spleen, then exited his back at the thoracic and lodged in his vest. It dislocated one rib and fractured another on its way out — guess it wanted to leave a mark, huh?”

“Is he okay?” I ask, before Barb can reply.

Dr. Skagle smiles. “Yes — second things second, he’ll be fine. We had to perform an aspiration procedure and splenectomy among other things, so he’ll be out for a while yet, but he’ll be okay. I’ll have to let him know he owes me some rent money when he comes around, though.”

Babs half-smiles. “But he _will_ be all right?”

“Yes,” Dr. Skagle says reassuringly. “Guessing he’ll be pretty salty upon waking up to learn he’ll have to take around three to six weeks off work, but other than that, he’ll be perfectly okay. There shouldn’t even be any long-term complications. Now, we’d like to keep him for a few days, just to be sure there’s no infection and to monitor his healing, but he should be good to go home before the weekend. And if I know him — which I think we can agree, I _do_ at least in this capacity — that will most definitely be the case. He can’t stand being holed up for longer than oh, about five minutes.” She pauses, and turns her gaze to me. “So who’s this?”

“This is Lourdes,” Babs says. “She’s Dick’s daughter.”

“Oh,” says Dr. Skagle. “I never knew Dick had a daughter.”

Barbara rests a hand on my arm and gives me a little squeeze. “We didn’t know until recently, either. She was a little Valentine’s surprise from Catalina.”

“Really?” Dr. Skagle says, and I don’t miss the surprise in her voice.

I can’t help myself, and I lean toward Dr. Skagle.

“You knew my mom?” I ask.

She smiles at me, the expression warm. “Not very well, I’m sorry. I only met her once. I’ve seen your dad a fair few times over the years, though. He’s _always_ in some scrape or another. Guy has no concept of personal safety.”

“That’s the truth,” Babs says. “Can we see him?” 

“Yes, you can go on back,” Dr. Skagle replies. “He should be awake in a few more hours — just after midnight by anesthesia’s estimation.”

Barbara nods, and rises. She turns to me. “You ready?”

I nod and stand, and as we follow Dr. Skagle through the hospital to the ICU, I reach over to Barb to catch hold of her wrist. She looks over at me, and wraps an arm around my shoulder as we walk. I briefly lay my head on her shoulder, missing my mother — but taking in this person, who so quickly has stepped up not to _fill_ the space that my mom left behind, but to create a new one. 

**Author's Note:**

> Quinceanera: Fifteenth Birthday  
> Tia: Aunt  
> Loca: Crazy  
> Puta: Bitch, whore  
> Asca: Freak  
> Fracasada/o: Useless  
> Cabron: Asshole, bastard  
> Tipo: Dude  
> Es un cabron sin lugar a duda: He's a douche for sure  
> Carino: Honey (m/f)  
> Mi tesoro: My treasure  
> Lo prometo, preciosa: I promise, precious  
> Vaya: Man (as in oh, man)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [DC Characters Ask Reddit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23435809) by [QueenofQuill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenofQuill/pseuds/QueenofQuill)




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